—and they twist and they turn to the music, faces dark with concentration. Fire spins around his fingers like ribbons, and his sleeves flutter wing-like. Red and gold, shining in the flickering light.
He feels his partner's hands at his waist, lifting him into the air; he keeps twirling his strands of flame. They slide around his outstretched wrists, and for a moment he can fly—
And then his foot lands on an outstretched hand; he does a neat flip and slender fingers enclose his hips to steady him. Heavy breaths in his ear, in and out in rhythm with his own. The fires are extinguished in a burst of colored light.
"Ladies and gentlemen, Wolf and Phoenix!"
His smile is as vibrant as his fluttering silk.
The ornate robes are beautiful and light and flowy, but they do tend to stick to his skin when he's all sweaty after a performance. He slides out of the tacky silk with a sigh and throws on some clean clothes instead. Still flowy, of course. He likes the flowiness of Chinese clothes; back home it was all tight trousers and tight boots and too many buttons. He flicks his blond hair back from his shoulders and turns to Lian.
"Can I use your hairbrush?"
"Yeah, sure."
Lian's face is oddly pinched-looking, white above the deep emerald green of his Wolf robes. Feliks pauses as he takes the brush.
"You okay?"
Lian opens his mouth, then closes it again, and shakes his head minutely. His eyes draw together with pain, hands fiddling absently with the ties on his clothes. Feliks brushes the back of his hand against Lian's forehead and frowns briefly.
"Why don't you change and..." he hates himself for saying it but it's the only thing that seems to relieve the stabbing pain in his friend's temples when he gets these attacks, and it will calm him down as well: "Have a smoke. Rest for a bit."
Lian nods and wanders off. Feliks starts pulling the hairbrush through his long locks.
"You were as graceful as always, Fei!"
He turns with a brilliant smile. "And you're, like, as pretty as ever! Gotta tell me your secrets, hun!"
"Oh, stop that." Mei grins and tosses her dark hair. "Where's Lian?"
"He's— resting."
"Ah." Her expression doesn't change. "Come eat dinner with us. You must be famished."
Yao is at the table stirring his soup absently, and Feliks feels his tongue tie itself up in knots. Yao seems nice enough, but he's older than Feliks and frankly quite intimidating. (Feliks doesn't have a problem with performing. It's talking face-to-face that makes him stumble.)
He stares at the table for a bit while Mei and Yao talk over his head.
"You're from Russia, aren't you?" Mei says loudly, and Feliks's head jerks up.
"Huh?" Oh, she's trying to involve him in the conversation. He flashes her a hasty confident smirk. "Heck no, we're Polish and proud of it!"
"We," notes Yao in a calm tenor. "Lian as well?"
"Yeah. We grew up together. He was my first friend, my best friend..." First kiss, first love, although there is no way he's saying that here. "We're, like, practically brothers."
"What's Poland like?" Mei asks eagerly. Feliks leans his head back and closes his eyes as he talks.
Rye fields under sunlight, crowns made of poppy flowers, and two boys making mischief (making love) instead of helping the harvest. They learned to dance there: Feliks has always been light on his feet, and out there with miles of horizon before them they could really pretend they were flying when they took turns throwing each other into the air, twisting and flipping in the pure blue sky. (He slips into Polish once, and doesn't notice for several sentences; the words still come easily to his lips like the smile he's perfected.)
"I always knew he would catch me," he says quietly. "We joked about it. He would threaten to leave and just let me fall if I was too stupid or reckless. But he never did. He was always, always there, ready to catch me."
"I never get tired of watching you dance together," says Mei, dreamy. "You move like one person."
"Trust," Yao intones, "is the essence of being dance partners. You can move freely, knowing he will not leave you behind. I envy you that bond."
Feliks rolls his shoulders back. "Thanks for the meal, Mei. It was really nice." He feels his long sleeves brush her shoulders when he stands, the soft linen whispering against his skin like feathers. The sun is almost entirely gone now; the stars are pinpricks of silver in the pink-orange clouds. He ducks inside.
"Hey," he says softly. Their room is full of sweetly pungent smoke; Lian's eyes are glazed and his shoulders limp. "Feeling better?"
Lian nods his head slowly. "Headache's gone," he mumbles.
"That's always good," says Feliks, kneeling beside him. "You missed dinner, by the way. Do you want me to run get you something?"
"I'm... not hungry." Lian's voice is weak and slurred. Feliks leans over and picks up the discarded hairbrush.
"I'll brush your hair, okay? You like that."
His friend stares at him, obviously doing his best to focus despite the drug in his system. "What... what's my name?" he whispers. "It's... It's not..."
"Ask me properly," says Feliks.
"I... I can't..."
"Come on," Feliks murmurs desperately. "You can do this."
It's long, agonizing minutes before the pale lips move and whisper haltingly in what used to be their native tongue. "Jak...jak mam na imię?"
"Jesteś Toris," Feliks tells him, and Toris closes his eyes and murmurs his own name as if to fix it in his memory. They both know it won't work. "Jesteś Toris, i jestem Feliks, i kocham cię. Please, Toris, you know that, try to hold on to that..."
"Ko-kocham cię." He grips Feliks's sleeve tightly. "I remember that, I can— I can keep that, I can—" but he's back in Chinese now. "Wo ai ni, Fei, I love you."
Feliks keeps his voice steady.
"Go to sleep, Lian." He runs his fingers through Toris's long brown hair, feeling the scar tissue behind the shell of his ear. "Go to sleep, and it'll all be better in the morning. Okay?"
The kindest thing would be for Lian to sleep, yes, and then not to wake, Feliks tells himself. He will drift away in a smoke-scented haze of beautiful dreams, won't have to fight for every piece of an identity they aren't even sure exists anymore. He could do it now; hold a pillow over his mouth and nose and end his friend's suffering forever. He almost did it the first night it occurred to him. It would be so easy.
...but... it's Toris. His long lashes flutter against his hollow cheeks, his lips are parted. He can't even look peaceful in sleep any longer.
They loved each other, once.
Does Toris still love him? It's hard to tell if the frantic grasping of any sort of anchor to his old life is an addition or a replacement. Hard to tell if Toris even remembers what love is, what love means. Maybe he's lost it along with past and language and hope.
You're leaving me behind after all, huh?
(Feliks remembers everything, how he watched understanding fade day after day in those solemn green eyes, and with every vanished memory his smile got wider and wider, brighter and brighter. He made Lian laugh sometimes, or sigh with exasperation. It didn't fix anything, of course. Didn't stop the headaches, didn't stop the fading. Didn't stop Toris from becoming Lian.)
I don't want you to go away.
So many promises, and strong hands still steady when they dance. Maybe shades of the old Toris are still poking through, maybe the body-memories won't fade like the mind-memories are; maybe those hands could still find their way through tender touches under the open sky, surrounded by the scents of home, if only he could find a way to pull his friend-brother-lover back from the shadows. Fire to purify and to cleanse; it burns through fields of stubble and chaff and the smoke is dark against the white clouds and he cannot destroy what is left of Toris who knelt beneath him laughing, too-tight trousers with too many buttons sticking to their skin with sweat.
And they loved each other, once. But now the boy he danced with in fields of rye and poppies is in a place Feliks cannot follow, getting farther and farther away, and as the fog closes between them it gets harder and harder to keep smiling.
This was inspired by a Chinese name generator I found online and the thought of Feliks in flowy silky Chinese-style dancing robes ^^ I don't know exactly what happened to Toris; the effect is something like dementia/slow-onset amnesia, coupled with debilitating migraines (for which he is taking opium, and yes he's addicted as well. Poor boy.) "Lian" is just the name he's going by in China, although Feliks sort of thinks of them as different people.
Also, for the record, as a linguist let me tell you THIS IS NOT HOW LANGUAGE WORKS. I wanted it this way for dramatic effect and I did it in the full knowledge that it is WRONG and frankly I like the way it turned out but I feel obliged to inform you of the liberties I took.
~Firebird