Chapter Seven: Dovetail
Word Count: 5,905
It was the lighthouse.
Xiao only notices it upon leaving that night, when he looks back for reasons even he does not know and finds the faint glow that bade him goodnight each evening after sunset and beckoned him back each advent of dawn— save one. There’s something beautiful about the way its light has thus returned to Venti’s dream, washing it clean of all the weighty shadows seeking to surround— perhaps even devour— it, just as Venti’s songs have done time and time again for him.
His stomach twists within his gut; Xiao realizes, suddenly, that he’s staring inappropriately. Neck burning with shame, Xiao tears his gaze away and resettles his mask.
He’ll return when he’s purged himself of hunger.
It’s not often that Venti asks they stay in the library when it’s otherwise such a beautiful day. Xiao is more used to requests for playing in the gardens or hunting for sea glass down by the beach— time spent outside with the wind, where he’d watch Venti laugh and sing and chat as loud and long as he’d like— but at the same time, Venti is a capricious little thing. Xiao knows this very well by now, so he hushes the delicate unease, which laps at the nerves bundled at the very base of his spine, and lets Venti talk him into cramming into an armchair together.
The clean, white clouds roll across the sky. Beside him, Venti lets out a small sigh, and from the corner of his eye, Xiao watches as the bard kicks his legs over the armrest, shifts into a shrimp-like slouch, and rests his head against Xiao’s shoulder. Then, evidently contented, Venti returns to the world between the pages of Heart of Clear Springs.
A lump starts to form in Xiao’s throat, and he casts his gaze away.
This dream does not belong to him.
What is this part of him which suddenly craves quiet warmth, like a flame tamed by the hearth? Didn’t he decide long ago he’d visit only for the purpose of paying his tithes?
(This dream cannot belong to him.)
Yet, the anxious baby hairs on the back of his neck settle at the sound of a turning page, his instincts sated by the implicit knowledge that Venti is safe; that he is happy and content, staying by Xiao’s side. There’s such a sweet satisfaction to the knowledge that he’s doing a good job of the task he’s been given…
“Xiao?”
It’s hardly more than a breath of a whisper brushed against his naked ear, but the sound of his own name still sends the sharpest of shivers spinning down Xiao’s spine. Sparks still fading, Xiao turns his head and finds Venti peeking at him from beneath his long, dark eyelashes, all his face— save for his pretty gemstone eyes— hiding behind his book cover.
It’s all Xiao can manage to simply grunt in acknowledgement.
((This dream can never belong to him.))
“What were you like as a child?” Venti asks, curiosity clear and sweet in his tone.
For a moment, Xiao thinks he’s swallowed on his own tongue from the way his throat tightens and he fails to even choke out a sound. As a child, he was…
“Naïve,” he spits out, then winces at how rough he sounds. He averts his gaze from Venti, whose wide eyes are otherwise unreadable, and tries again, effort as careful as carving jade put behind each word. “When I was a child, I carried a different name.”
The ebbing ocean waves off in the distance wash ashore.
“This name of mine, that which you know me by, was bestowed upon me by my Lord Rex Lapis when I first came under his rule.” Something in his chest aches, trapped by walls which are suddenly far too close and a ceiling which now feels far too low. “It used to describe a type of demon found in the mountains a long time ago. Do you truly wish to know why today it is mine?”
Though Xiao dares not look his way, he still feels Venti’s gentle body heat shifting right beside him, hears the quiet thud of his book placed off to the side.
“I’d love to hold your story in my heart,” Venti tells him, pressing closer to Xiao’s side. “If you’ll let me.”
The memories, like vines, creep over the cracks of his once-hollow bones, pushing through his flesh as they take root in his nerves; the base of his neck, with his throat so exposed, prickles with pressures of many years past.
“It’s not a happy story,” Xiao warns, a murmur.
(Will your dream still taste the same if I tell it?)
“I never said it had to be,” Venti replies.
It has been many a century since Xiao has spoken of his youth, even as its remnants continue to paper the entirety of his current self, like the faint, ghostly teeth of karmic debt scraping against his neck. He swallows it all down, then banishes that which remains with a sigh.
“All right.”
…
The air is crisp and dry that autumn day, as frost sinks its teeth into even his breath. The young boy, small even for his age, trundles down the icy trail in search of pure-white snowdrifts. The wind drags its gnarled chill across his delicate back, and with a shiver, he tries to hide under his feathers.
He’s not supposed to leave home on days like this, for his feathers are not yet fully developed for this weather, but the skies were calling to him, he thinks. Some instinct drew him from the nest, and now his stomach is hollow and his hands are numb. He blows on his fingers and feels them tingle, as if shards of glass have been crushed and buried beneath his skin.
(Still, it is something aside from hunger.)
There’s a woman by the river, hidden by a snowdrift and hunched over a body, lying still. The boy, still on his first human lifetime, knows not what that might mean. He creeps closer and closer out of naïve curiosity.
“Oh, little boy,” the woman calls soon enough. “Are you lost?”
The young child freezes. He could have sworn her back was turned.
“Don’t be shy,” the woman says. She straightens her back with a smile and hides the face cradled on her lap. “Jiejie won’t hurt you.”
Something sweet drifts his way, and the young boy tentatively approaches. “What are you doing?”
“I’m watching over this young man’s sleep,” the jiejie replies, and she combs the snow from her own long, unpinned hair.
(The little boy thinks he sees a faint, white splotch upon her tongue.)
His stomach abruptly rumbles, and he blushes, stumbling backwards to take from the nearby snowdrift, but the jiejie extends a hand and grabs his chin, turning his head this way and that.
“You’re so skinny,” she remarks, just like an auntie. She lets go of his face. “Close your eyes, and I’ll get you something to eat.”
The sweetness in the air grows stronger still. Although uncertain, the young boy still obediently covers his eyes, and he hears a quiet, guttural moan dragged from someone’s throat—one which he cannot tell if it draws from pain or pleasure.
Before he can decide, however, the woman tugs his palm away from his eyes and places something soft, smooth, and just firm enough to hold its basic shape into his hands.
“Try this,” she tells him.
The little boy stares, transfixed, at the delicate lump now cupped in both his hands. Though faintly damp, the frost does not take hold of it, and every pale, pearlescent color in existence shimmers on its surface in the midday light.
(He fails to notice how the woman wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.)
The fragrance is what convinces him, though: sweet, but not cloying; clean, but not sharp. It reminds him of qingxin on the summer breeze, and although he knows true qingxin to be bitter, he still shuts his eyes and takes a careful bite…
It’s like a lullaby at first, slow and tender. Warmth envelops him as he swallows that initial bite, then tears into the gift in fervent earnest. Joy and laughter dissolve onto his tongue; a long-awaited reunion, flush with endless bliss, blooms between his teeth. Felicitous well-wishes, sobbing celebratory songs, sweeping gales of relief— the unfamiliar rewards of a life well-lived pour down his throat.
(Wind stirs all around him, lacing its threads through his half-grown feathers, and that ancient instinct buried in him, which lured him here by asking for the skies, squirms in excited satisfaction.)
((This is what he’s meant to do, how he’s meant to live.))
“Good boy,” the kindly woman breathes. She cards her fingers through his hair, taloned nails soothing in their gentle grooming. The young boy basks in the jiejie’s praise, feeding on the satisfaction until he’s lapping at his emptied hands, and the sting of dirt and salt forces the lovely reverie away.
His breath fogs before his bleary eyes as the returning chill transforms the blood in his hands into needles. “Oh.”
He’s still starving.
On the strange woman’s lap, that half-forgotten young man groans. The young boy jumps and skitters anxiously backwards, his little bird-heart beating fast in his chest, unsettled by the strange sound.
But the jiejie casually covers the man’s mouth with a hand, quieting him. “Don’t worry; he enjoys it,” she reassures the boy, whose hackles cautiously settle. “His dreams taste good, no?” she then asks, her voice suddenly laden with a sweetness much the same as that which now lingers on his tongue.
A dream…
Still, he nods, albeit while avoiding her gaze. He hopes— perhaps irrationally— she won’t notice how badly he’s craving more.
The jiejie seems to have a keen intuition, though, and the boy watches as she thoughtfully fingers the tufts of hair on her lap. “If you’d like, I can find you another dream to eat,” she offers him.
He swallows back the rush of drool flooding his mouth— after all, it’s impolite for little children to ask for more than they are given.
The jiejie begins to laugh, covering her mouth with a hand as she throws her head back. “Dangerous creatures are starting to stir out there in the wider world, you know. It’s the duty of the older generation to guide and nurture the things living under us, especially in times like these,” she informs him with the weight of full confidence, as carefully leans into his view. “All I’d like in exchange is to know something so very simple…”
She gestures him closer, and a brusque wind gathers itself around them, seemingly a promise of safety as he creeps shyly toward her. Then, with the warmest of smiles, she leans in, as if honoring a secret:
“What’s your name, little monster?”
The air is crisp and dry that autumn day, when the little boy stands upon his tiptoes and offers up his Name with nothing but a whisper of a breath in exchange for another dream.
“What a lovely name you have,” she tells him. She traces his cheek with a talon, and a chill more vicious than the depths of a famished winter sinks into his spine. She opens her mouth to continue, and he realizes now that he made a mistake, but it’s already too late—
“You will call me ‘Master’, my dear ▉▉▉▉.”
—he’s already gone.
The man asleep at his master’s lap stirs; the young boy tries to flinch, to fly as far and away as he could, not to simply cry as a child would. But his master’s claws now crush his wrist without even touching him— not even the swiftest of winds could save him now.
“Lucky, lucky,” she hums. “It seems another dream is burgeoning anew.”
He wills his gaze away as she holds the young man’s face and forces his jaw open. He wishes his throat could close up and choke him to death right here, right now, as she pushes a pair of fingers into his mouth. He wants to thrash and scream and scream and scream as she flutters her eyelashes and dips her head down.
But he can’t. His desires are in vain. He almost cannot breathe as he watches his master reveal her sharp teeth, and with the grace of a mandarin duck crossing a still, clear pond, she cuts into his sleep and from his breath pulls long, white tendrils, which coalesce into a fresh and fragile dream.
She languidly spits the final product into her hand, where it shivers like flowers in torrential rain. “You’re still hungry, aren’t you?”
The boy shuts his eyes and tries to slow his breathing (no, he’s not), wishing to the skies above (he can’t be) for someone, somewhere (he doesn’t want to be—) to take away the gnaw of longing. She didn’t use his true name; he has the freedom to object.
He opens his mouth, yet it is impossible to deny.
((He wishes his open jaw wouldn’t tremble with wanting.))
The hunger persists.
Silently, pliantly, and against his will, he nods.
His master bids him to her side.
“Good,” she says when he complies, and he hates how nice the tiny, heated pins and needles feel as they prickle down his spine.
“There are several ways to take a dream,” she tells him, then threads her claws into his hair and drags him to her level. “The first is as you just saw— simply swallow the sweetness as it billows from their lips.” She floats the prize before his eyes while the faintest of breezes serves him its pretty scent.
Saliva floods his mouth out of sheer, uncomfortable instinct, his tiny body already half-devoured by the most basal of desires. His bones burn and ache; his stomach turns; his heart screams at him to move.
Yet, the moment he even twitches, his master snatches her hand away and snaps, “Wait for my orders.” Then with dream engouled, she pops the dainty thing between her teeth, and a sweetly-scented milky substance dribbles from her grin. She swallows the remnants of the man’s stolen dream, and the richly fragrant residual splatters scattered on his face bring the boy near the edge of vomiting.
“It falls to me to teach my little monster self-restraint, I see,” she sighs, then digs her talons into his skull, forcing down his gaze. Pointing to the man’s his sleeping eyelids, she tells the boy, “Rip them out.”
His hackles raise; his lower throat feels empty.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” he softly says, but that’s a lie. His appetite tears out his stomach, guts his liver, and cracks his spine; it rends him hollow, his whole life engulfed by this new and painful wanting.
But his master sees right through him: her hand trails to his nape, where she picks at the downy baby feathers rooted in his skin. “I’m not a monster,” she tells him, her voice soft and low. “You need to eat— I’m here to teach you.”
The blood unborn in his marrow curdles into fear.
“Gouge his eyes out.”
(I don’t want to.)
“Ungrateful child— you cannot eat them as I do.”
((Why do I want to?))
The man is bleeding underneath him; his master’s hand is hard on his back as he struggles and struggles against her will. The dream he craves is close enough to taste, but he doesn’t want it he cannot want it he will not want it
“Devour it now, ▉▉—”
…
Thud.
A bird flies into the window, and Xiao wakes up with a start— not from slumber, but from memory. For a moment, he forgets his place and scrambles for his weapon, only for a pair of hands to catch his arm, and out of instinct, he teleports away.
“Xiao…” The familiar voice, heavy with heartbreak, snaps him from his panic.
He’s not a little boy anymore.
“Venti,” the yaksha breathes, guilt piling up his throat. He’s been too much; he should leave; he cannot stain this dream any longer. He opens his mouth and struggles for words, knowing the bard hates silent goodbyes, but all that falls from his quivering jaw is a simple, stupid, “Forgive me.”
Venti catches his hand before he can leave, and Xiao lets him hold it.
A moment passes in silence, then another. Eventually, Xiao finds his gooseflesh fading as his heartbeat slows to steady, and in the empty space stirring underneath his skin, he yearns.
(For what?)
((He doesn’t know.))
He hears Venti shuffle closer, then blushes when he feels Venti’s bangs press against his nape and quiet sigh brush between his shoulder blades.
“I’m going to check on that little bird,” Venti murmurs. “So please, if you’ll stay…”
Xiao says nothing, stiff as a board, while Venti quietly releases him. A tender breeze runs through his hair, and he turns around just in time to watch Venti climb through the open window.
He longs for his wings again.
It’s lonesome in the library, left all by himself.
He hopes Venti comes back quickly.
“Xiao!!”
With a small but wary frown, Xiao ends his meditation and finds Venti darting up to him, cheeks flushed as red as the apples he so often sings about. Curious, he cranes his neck to observe the way Venti unfurls the hands clutched to his chest, revealing a tiny baby songbird.
(The angle of its left wing carves a chasmic pain into the veins beneath Xiao’s own shoulder blades: that ancient memory, still sharp in his mind, pins him down by the hackles for the thinnest split of a second.)
Xiao blinks away his thoughts. “The bird,” he dumbly says.
“We should help it,” Venti says, and there’s a layer of thin, watery emotion which has draped itself over the otherwise songbird-sweet timbre of his voice.
Xiao feels his neck prickle with uncertainty. “That’s… not a task I can help you with,” he hesitantly replies, and he folds his hands across his chest (as if that will hide his racing heart).
Venti makes a strange, little noise; the baby bird peeps pathetically from its cradle in his hands. Venti breaks their gaze to soothe it with a tender hush, then asks, “Why not?”
Xiao looks away and tries to shake the pity clinging to his heartstrings. There’s no point, he wants to say. Wing injuries are difficult to fix in any way that would make the bird’s life worth living after the fact.
But when he dares another glance at the creature, he ends up watching as Venti pets its little head with a single slender finger, gives it a tiny butterfly’s kiss to send it off to sleep itself. It’s just so small, so sadly and helplessly fragile…
He thinks of all the bodies just like it that he used to leave lying mangled in the dirt, and he feels their radiant warmness fading from his hands once more.
“I told you earlier,” Xiao softly says. A wretch like me could never be a savior. “I deal in death. I’m a yaksha, filled with karmic debts.” I can’t be touching such precious living things with my bare and bloodied hands.
((He thinks of Venti in his hands, haloed by the sunlight as they dance.))
“You couldn’t hurt a thing here, even if you tried,” Venti replies, and oh-so daringly, he creeps closer to Xiao. “Look at me—”
(But you’re an exception.)
“—I haven’t died.”
Xiao swallows down his breath, tries to clutch his lungs inside his clenched fist, as Venti reaches out and cups his naked jaw.
“Perhaps outside, you lead a life of only slaughter,” the bard continues, “but Xiao, I know you’re not a monster.”
Xiao says nothing, though he swears he feels his heart collapsing, for the moment he checks Venti’s face and sees that pretty pair of jade-bright eyes staring straight at him, the bitterness clutching at his chest seems to all at once fade away.
Are you sure?
Venti purses his lips. “Please, Xiao?” he begs, wide eyes shining with hope. “I want to try.”
Xiao looks away. (His cheeks seem to burn.)
“I…” he begins, then finds his voice unduly whisked away.
He thinks of the ocean spray as, against all odds, he lives to see the dawn of another day. He thinks of lanterns, flames flickering like stars, as they float into the sky.
(He thinks of Venti in his hands, haloed by the sunlight as they dance.)
A friendly breeze swirls circles around them both as he sighs. “What do you have in mind?” he asks, with a softness that surprises even himself. (He uncrosses his arms to leave his heart unguarded.)
Venti lights up. “Hold out your hands,” he instructs.
Feeling a little silly, Xiao obeys, expecting Venti to simply lead him somewhere else, only for the latter to deposit the injured fledgling into his hands, and he freezes.
Venti seems to notice this immediately, suddenly watching Xiao with a strange and intense sort of burning; Xiao feels it prickling at the back of his throat in almost the same way that nightmares do as they try to claw themselves free.
Xiao knows he could never be anyone’s savior himself. But Venti?
If Venti trusts him with the fledgling, then Xiao will shut his mouth and swallow it down. He’ll place the bedrock of his trust in Venti’s word with the well-practiced obedience of any Liyue soldier, even as threads of painful sympathy weave ugly patterns between the faded scars trailing down his back…
“You don’t have to if you don’t want to,” Venti blurts out, with a palpable rush of anxiety that seems to rankle the dream at its edges.
Xiao feels the faint heartbeat of the sleeping fledgling through the leather of his gloves as he looks at Venti, eyebrows furrowing from the sudden sense of hollow confusion. “But you asked me to.” But you wanted me to.
“Well, yes, but that shouldn’t be the only reason you do something,” Venti replies, and Xiao can feel the slight distress slipping through his tone like droplets of blood from an oozing vein. “There should be some part of you that wants to act for your own reasons, too, like—”
The flash of anger, so rare and reviled, spits the next words from Xiao’s mouth: “I don’t do anything unwillingly.” You are not my god. “My freedom is that of acting exactly as I want.”
Yet the way Venti stares at him, shocked and hurt like an injured bird himself, stings all the more keenly, as the air, once so playful, is stands suffocatingly still.
“Your life is your own,” Venti says, quietly. “Don’t suggest I don’t know that.”
(For half a second, all Xiao feels is blood on his hands.)
It is the gentle rise and fall of the tiny body breathing in his palms which delicately reanchors Xiao to reality. “I gave my life to my Lord in an act of free will.” (Perhaps the only one he’s ever truly made, even.) “I have no regrets. I am but a weapon to execute his will.”
“Even when his will asks you to force down a dream?”
(It sounds like a test.)
((Still, Xiao is a child of Liyue: he knows his duty by heart, if not by rote.))
“My Lord knows I’ve sworn never to swallow sweet dreams again,” he slowly says. “I banish nightmares, and nothing more.”
The Venti whom Xiao has come to know these past few decades has always been, in a way, almost larger than life, to the point where it often seems impossible not to know his every fleeting thought or feeling, but the fact of the matter is, Venti can be an incredibly difficult person to read when he so chooses. Normally, Xiao doesn’t bother with that sort of social nonsense— he’s not a person, so naturally he’s never been able to make much of human emotions.
This time, though, just this once, Xiao wishes that wasn’t so.
“The bounds between dream and nightmare are about as clear as those between night and day,” Venti tells him, with a weight to his words which could rival Rex Lapis. “Are you sure you know the line between them?”
One part of him, wretched and stained by thousands upon thousands of karmic debts, wants to huff in contempt, because how could he not?
Yet, Xiao says nothing. Because the deeper part of him knows, despite hating to admit it, that most things of this world are only so because they have been drawn in the finest of lines. He knows very well how much he loved the dreams he devoured as a child, just as well as he knows how devoutly he loathed the ordeal. It would be stupid of him to pretend otherwise, not when the cravings still linger, clamped inside his jaw.
Venti continues to stare at him. “I’d like to ask you once again: what would you do, if given orders for something you don’t want to do?”
“I would refuse,” the yaksha insists.
The only thing Xiao can read beneath Venti’s otherwise impassive expression is a sense of grief he knows all-too well from the mirror. “Even if it came from Rex Lapis?”
Xiao hesitates. Of course, he wants to say, even opens his mouth to argue. Yet, truth refuses those words passage through his throat, and in his hesitation, his frustration sublimates into something infinitely uglier.
(At the end of the day, he still goes out to fight.)
“…It depends,” he finally admits.
“On what?” Venti immediately presses, folding his arms across his chest.
A lump starts to form inside of Xiao’s throat, and he finds it is impossible to swallow down as that monstrous feeling continues to grow. But he said it earlier, didn’t he? It shouldn’t be so hard to say it again now.
“What I want more.” And although he says it normally, Xiao inwardly flinches. He’s still not used to this, this confession of desire. He has to cut it out, exorcise it from his being, lest he—
“Oh?” Venti’s demeanor transforms from upset to almost predacious, his eyes distractingly aglitter. “And what might you want more than your own comfort and happiness?”
…This damn bard, Xiao thinks, a nervous scowl tugging his lips downward as he now regrets wishing Venti was more readable.
Xiao has refused his Lord before on occasion. Those moments were rare, though, the direst of times when the weapon broke down and the child wept blood, and his failure to comply became necessity.
(To be obedient, he knows: The desire lives in his hands, constantly longing to serve.)
The truth is, the idea of disappointing his Lord, the one who gave him this very freedom to refuse, terrifies him still— is that not why he still fights, even against the rotting corpses of dreams?
((To be good, he means: The yearning is nestled into the very chambers of his heart, tries to escape every time he acts.))
With all his life a tithe upon a scale which still has never risen, Xiao wants to pay his dues. He has already accepted far more kindness than any weapon should even be offered— to take any more would steal from the suffering he still owes. But that’s not something he wants to tell Venti, whom he knows would bleed his own heart out for the sake of Xiao’s life, so he willfully ignores that answer and searches desperately within himself for another.
He turns up nothing.
He thinks of Venti in his hands, haloed by the sunlight as they dance.
“I don’t know,” he says at last, a lie that has convinced itself it is the truth.
Venti tilts his head at Xiao, bright green gaze as piercing as ever. “Clearly, since he keeps it, Morax knows your loyalty to him comes from your freedom to give it in the first place.”
Xiao bristles at how casually the other man uses his Lord’s name. He momentarily tries to clench his fist, only to stop when he remembers the sleeping fledgling.
Venti continues. “It’s in your power to say ‘No’.” He takes a step in Xiao’s direction, yet somehow the distance between them grows. “So what keeps you?”
((Has it always been growing?))
The heart, once set in stone, is a difficult thing to shatter. Harder still is the heart which has since been cast in brass.
“Loyalty is not something fickle, like the breeze,” Xiao chides. (Anemo gathers around him, tugging at his longer locks of hair as if to mock him.) “It is something that must endure any test it is given, like the ground beneath one’s feet.”
At this, Venti pulls up his feet and sits, hovering on an updraft, smug as can be as he ever-so slowly leans closer to Xiao.
“But to be steadfast is not your dream, now is it?” he asks, voice oddly alluring.
(The hairs on Xiao’s arm stand upright, haunted by the ghost of a touch, while his heart starts to slow, each beat thudding more and more deliberately against his chest.)
The bard says nothing more, but there is still an uncomfortable knowing to his silence, one which only grows as his gaze intently wanders all over Xiao’s person until it settles on the latter’s left hand.
Xiao is seized by the urge to cradle his hand to his chest and hide his Vision from view, as if that will pluck his heart from where it has unwittingly settled upon his sleeve.
((He would rather be blindfolded and slowly stripped naked by a stranger, only to discover he’d been made the offering on an altar, left vulnerable and alone in a shrine made of mirrors.))
Instead, he covers the helpless fledgling in his hands. “It is something I choose to be,” he swears, as if staring down his own grave.
Venti’s intensity, sharp as pins on a vivisection table, softens. “Well, in that case, there’s nothing for me to fear, now is there?” he muses, quieter than a full breath, yet still echoing perfectly through Xiao’s mind.
(“I promise you, Xiao, you will never be the reason I have nightmares.”)
Venti steps down from the sky and approaches with all the feather-light delicacy of the first spring showers, loops a hand around Xiao’s arm, resting his head on the bare skin of the yaksha’s shoulder for all of a moment.
((…So then why is he hungry?))
Yet, when Venti tugs him away, Xiao obediently follows.
The boundless skies tug at his heartstrings while the salty sea-breeze reminds him of home. The far horizon burns with fading sunlight; Xiao sits on a wall with the bird in his hands and his hands on his lap, watching intently while Venti prepares (or so he proclaims) to fix the little bird’s wing and aching, in that deeply shameful way, to pull feathers from his skin again.
The fledgling in his open palm begins to stir, and dread creeps down Xiao’s spine. He doubts he has much longer before his karmic debts will outright kill it.
He reaches out to carefully stroke its little head with his thumb, and he regrets the layer of his leather glove. As if it weren’t already such a pity for such a tiny creature to perish at his hand, he can’t even offer it the comfort of being held, of being touched sincerely, despite the terrible filth of dying.
Not that a monster’s touch would be of much comfort.
The bird flinches, briefly thrashing its wing, and Xiao prepares himself for its agonized shrieking.
But it never comes.
Instead, he hears Venti singing.
It’s not a song Xiao knows or even understands— Venti must have chosen a ballad from old Mondstadt— but he’s enraptured all the same. Small sprites of glowing Anemo form in the air, dancing like fireflies and humming pretty accompaniments, and Xiao cannot help but to feel as if something tremendous and powerful now rushes through him. Something like faith, perhaps, except that it pulls him forward instead of holds back his sin, raises a sense of wonder instead of grounding his thoughts, and invites him to lift his head up instead of bow down, all with the ease of a breath rushing into his lungs.
All the while, the winds swirling around them tangle together as they brush past him, song multiplying and harmonizing until Xiao thinks he hears a thousand voices together as one, a perfect hymn performed by glorious choir, and he feels so impossibly small before it— or rather, the weight of his past, as always he’s borne on his shoulders, becomes so insignificant that it becomes terrifying, as if there’s nothing left of himself except that which stands before him.
Just a tiny bard from Mondstadt with the voice of an angel.
And as Xiao lets out a sigh of awe, he becomes more sharply aware of the shape of his own humanity than he ever has before.
(Something strange, yet all-too familiar grows in his chest, the sort of thing that should be broken like a horse or even muzzled like a dog.)
((He wants to sink his teeth into Venti’s n—))
Right as the sunset burns away to twilight, the newly-healed, now-adult songbird bursts from Xiao’s hands and soars into the newborn night, a gale of wind sweeping over their heads so strongly, Venti ceases his singing, instead laughing, holding his hat steady while his braids dust his cheeks with the loveliest of sky-blue glows, and Xiao’s lungs seem to burst.
The bird survived.
And so have I.
With the same sort of sigh that comes from the joys of a life well-lived, Venti turns around, and as he meets Xiao’s eye, the latter thinks of all the fallen feathers he’s witnessed Venti send away.
“I know the night will whisk you soon away,” Venti says, as the first tiny stars peek out in agreement, “but before you go, I think you should know how happy it always makes me to see you day-by-day. You’re not a burden, or a monster, and I…”
The full moon rises into view, like a lantern or an eye.
“…would love for you to visit with regularity again.”
[“I promise you, Xiao, you will never be the reason I have nightmares.”]
There’s something here that he’s never seen before in life, hidden in the crannies comprising the fine details of the dream, a beautiful mundanity which calls to him in a way nothing else ever has, in an offer he has never been given as a choice.
I want to, Xiao thinks.
And normally, he’d think that it could be enough, that it should be enough, just to want something. To chase after it would be too much, after all.
“I will.”
He knows he’s said this once before, on that rainy evening long ago when all Venti would ask of him was for a simple conversation, but that was a statement made on behalf of something else. This time, when he speaks, he does so to give Venti his word, and as every soul raised in Liyue knows, that’s worth more than the blood within his veins.
I promise.