"I was born on January 15, 1997," Xiao Xingchen replies without a trace of hesitation, but A-Qing presses on, undeterred.
"I am sure that's what your papers say. The papers my brother made for you."
"What is this, A-Qing. Where are you going with this?" Xue Yang asks her, his voice probably the most serious he has ever used with her.
"Can you explain this picture to me?" A-Qing retorts with a question of her own, and slides her phone over the table.
When Xue Yang sees what is on its display, he swears under his breath.
It's a picture of Xiao Xingchen waiting at the pedestrian crossing next to the Sixth High School, wearing his white robes and holding his sword. Someone has posted it on Weibo with a caption, 'do you know this actor? he looks real cute', accompanied with a heart-eyes emoticon.
The picture seems to be trending, to Xue Yang's dismay, because publicity is the last thing any of them need right now. It has also launched a passionate discussion full of names of actors Xue Yang has never heard of in his life, as historical dramas are not really his thing.
"What picture?" Xiao Xingchen asks.
"It's from this morning," Xue Yang informs him. "When you were on your way to the park, someone on the street snapped a picture of you without your permission and put it online. What an asshole thing to do!"
Xiao Xingchen raises his eyebrows at that, and Xue Yang immediately remembers their early morning argument.
"What I did was in the interest of your health, this is totally different," he tries to defend himself, but the cultivator doesn't look very impressed with him.
"So can you explain it or not?" A-Qing asks Xue Yang impatiently.
"Little Starfish does some cosplaying. Why're you making such a big deal out of it?" Xue Yang is quick to reply. "I would've thought that you of all people would understand," he adds, alluding to A-Qing's own brief cosplaying stint when she was about seventeen.
"It says here the picture was taken at 5:22 this morning," A-Qing tells him flatly. "If I'm not wrong, that's about a half an hour before you called me and told me your boyfriend ran away from home. I hope you don't expect me to believe that he was cosplaying while doing that."
"Why not? He was just trying on his new cosplay when we had that fight," Xue Yang persistently attempts to stick to his story, but he's sadly aware how increasingly absurd it sounds.
A-Qing lets out a derisive snort.
"Even if I did believe that – which I don't – it still doesn't explain why the hell you thought your Grindr boyfriend would seek refuge in my dorm of all places. Care to enlighten me?"
Xue Yang grimaces at this. He knew this would come up sooner or later, but he's been simply unable to think of any plausible explanation for his morning behavior.
"I said that we should tell your sister the truth," Xiao Xingchen repeats. "The entire truth," he adds pointedly.
It does seem rather inevitable now, Xue Yang has to admit. But the problem is that he doesn't know where to even begin. At the moment when Xiao Xingchen appeared in his apartment? Or is he supposed to start at their first meeting in the past, the one he himself fails to remember and which he frankly doesn't think is his sister's business?
There's a brief silence, during which Xue Yang is unsuccessfully trying to compose his thoughts, and then it's A-Qing who speaks up.
"You came here from the past, didn't you, Xiao-xiongzhang?"
Xiao Xingchen nods.
"But how?" Xue Yang cannot help but raise his voice at his sister. "How could you tell? When I first met Little Starfish, I totally refused to believe anything like that even though he appeared in my place out of nowhere, all dressed up in those white robes and swinging his damn sword around. I just thought he was some random psycho! Wouldn't that be a more likely explanation? How did you know that he was from the past from one stupid photo?! It doesn't make any fucking sense!"
Xue Yang is aware that he's way more upset about the fact that A-Qing has seen through his lie than would be appropriate, but the thing is that this entire situation keeps spiraling out of his control, and he just hates it.
Suddenly, there is a hand on top of his.
"You should eat something sweet," Xiao Xingchen advises him gently.
"Yeah, your boyfriend's right," A-Qing chimes in. "How 'bout I get you some cake, Big Jerk? My treat."
Xue Yang just gapes at her. He doesn't remember the last time his sister offered to buy him anything. Which is perfectly fine, because between the two of them, it's him and not her who's got a job and makes money. Before he has the chance to stop her, however, she's off to the counter, capturing the attention of the server and pointing at one of the cakes on display.
Xue Yang turns to look at Xiao Xingchen, who is sitting perfectly still, with his pale but warm hand a comforting weight on top of Xue Yang's, and wearing an expression that is both serene and unreadable.
Xue Yang has a rather disheartening thought that he will never, ever understand this man, even though he appreciates the unexpected gesture.
Xiao Xingchen only retracts his hand when a plate with a piece of raspberry cheesecake appears in front of Xue Yang, who doesn't need any further incentive to dig in. The first bite of the sour-sweet delicacy sends a shock of pleasure through his entire being, and he feels better almost instantly.
"Ready for my Hercule Poirot moment?" A-Qing asks when he's about halfway through.
At present, Xue Yang's mouth is full of the delicious cheesecake, so he just nods.
"Alright. Point one – the hair. Would a normal guy about my age keep his hair long out of respect for his elders? I think not. Point two – when I said something about America, Xiao-xiongzhang had a look of someone who has never heard of this country in his life. I first thought that he spaced out or something, but you were also acting weird about it so it kept nagging at me."
A-Qing pauses and takes a moment to finish her latte, delicately wiping a bit of cream smeared above her upper lip with a napkin before resuming her speech.
"Point three – the accent. When I first met you, Xiao-xiongzhang, I was really intrigued by the way you speak. So intrigued, actually, that I later spent the entire evening and half of the night listening to recordings of every single dialect of Chinese – trust me, there's loads – and none of them sounds exactly like you. Curious, huh?"
"When people look at you, they'd never guess just how much of a nerd you actually are, Little Bitch," Xue Yang observes.
"This from a guy who still keeps a collection of Final Fantasy action figures he hand-painted when he was thirteen," A-Qing retorts drily. "Anyway, let's not get off topic here, I'm not done yet. Point four is of course the Weibo pic we already talked about, and point five the fact that you looked for your boyfriend in my dorm. Is that not enough for you?"
Xue Yang puts down his fork, still feeling a bit vexed, but also rather impressed with his sister. Who would've thought she'd be able to connect the dots like that!
A-Qing goes on, her voice now assuming a pensive quality.
"The thing is, I still might've thought that he was simply a lunatic, just like you did – no offense, Xiao-xiongzhang – especially since you said you two met on Grindr. I would've probably never put two and two together and come to this conclusion if it wasn't for that last point. Because after your phone call, I had to ask myself – why would you think that he'd come to me, a girl he's only met once in his life? And the only answer I was able to come up with was that me and Xiao-xiongzhang must've met before – and then I remembered that we did. Sort of."
"Sort of?" Xue Yang asks in incomprehension.
"In a dream," A-Qing explains to him. "Don't you remember the freaky story mom tells about my night terrors?"
"Which one? She's got tons of those. I think her favorite is the one where you thought you were a canary and were scared that Mr. Meow would eat you," Xue Yang replies, grinning a little at the memory.
"Mr. Meow?" Xiao Xingchen asks in such confusion that it makes Xue Yang giggle.
"That was our cat. A-Qing named him, not me. And that's not the worst, actually; a few years later we also had a cat she insisted we call Hello."
"No, not that one," A-Qing says with a frown, for once completely ignoring his attempts at levity. "I mean the time when I asked mom where my other older brother was."
…
The day of Xue Yang's ninth birthday remained in his memory for several reasons at once. One of them was that it was the first time he had ever seen his mom smoking, but that was probably the least important bit.
The thing he considered the most important at the time was that it was his birthday, and that he got a huge Lego Gundam as a present on the night before, and managed to put it together over the course of the day. He was eager for dad to come from work so he could show him his creation; mom had already praised him, of course, but Xue Yang knew she wasn't much into robots so she didn't really get it. Dad, though, even watched the Gundam anime with him on weekends sometimes, so Xue Yang thought that he, at least, would really appreciate how awesome it was. It was dad who chose this present, after all.
So Xue Yang was in his room, admiring his work and thinking about taking a picture of it, when A-Qing, aged about three and a half, wandered inside. She said that the Gundam was pretty, which Xue Yang liked, and immediately wanted to play with it, which he liked a lot less.
He tried to reason with her, telling her that it was his birthday present and he wanted to enjoy it, and also show it to dad, but once his sister set her mind on something there was no telling her otherwise. She started stomping her foot down and crying that she wanted big bro's robot, and she wanted it now.
The time for reasoning was clearly over; Xue Yang proceeded to yell at his sister to leave his room, but that only made her emit those ear-splitting high-pitched shrieks he absolutely loathed.
He decided to use the fact that he was a lot bigger and stronger than A-Qing to his advantage, catching his sister around the waist and trying to bodily remove her out of his room, but she managed to wriggle out of his grip and get a hold of the Gundam. Then she looked Xue Yang square in the eye and threw it on the ground with all the force she could muster.
He doesn't remember the next few moments very well; it was as if the world got covered by something like mist and all the sounds were coming from a distance for a while. Then he suddenly heard himself growling, like some rabid beast, while A-Qing howled, also more like an animal than a human being. When mom ripped them apart a moment later, Xue Yang was boxing his sister's ears while A-Qing tried to scratch his face in return.
Mom didn't yell, which was the scariest part.
"A-Yang," she said, and never before did her voice sound so stern, so disappointed. "I thought better of you. Are you not ashamed? Such a big boy, and beats his poor defenseless little sister like a brute."
Xue Yang raised his hand to a nasty scratch on his face, which was beginning to sting, all ready to argue about A-Qing's alleged defenselessness, but his mother went on.
"What if something happened to her eyes? She's only had her last surgery a month ago! And think of her glasses!"
Fortunately, it turned out that A-Qing was unharmed; she didn't get as much as a bruise out of it. Her very expensive special glasses were also more or less alright. One of the legs got crooked, but that was rather easy to fix.
"I'm sorry. I braked big bro's robot," A-Qing sniffled in an obvious attempt to gain mom's sympathy. It worked.
"Well, that was a very bad thing to do, my dear, but your brother still shouldn't have hit you," Xue Yang's mother said gently, hugging her crying daughter and looking at her son in such a way that Xue Yang resolved that he'd never ever touch his sister again even if she set his whole room on fire. Despite getting off lightly, A-Qing also learned her lesson and never again broke any of his things on purpose.
Had it ended there, it'd be nothing but a boring tale from a schoolbook, with a not so subtle morale about treating your siblings nicely. The incident, however, had a rather interesting finale.
The thing was, A-Qing sometimes suffered from night terrors. That meant that she would get up from her bed in the middle of night – or afternoon, if it was a daytime nap – and scream at the top of her lungs, sometimes while running around her room in circles. On occasion, she didn't shriek but instead blathered on about some complete nonsense, the canary and Mr. Meow being a prime example of that.
When people talked to A-Qing when she was in this condition, she hardly ever reacted. Not even splashing her with cold water, which dad tried once, would make her snap out of it. There was nothing to do but wait for it to pass; she'd eventually either wake or go back to sleep, and usually didn't remember anything about her episode afterwards.
On the night after Xue Yang beat her, he was woken by A-Qing crying. When he went to her room to see what was going on, he found that mom was already there, with her arms around A-Qing in an attempt to comfort her, but his sister kept sniffling. "I want my brother, I want my brother," was what she kept saying unhappily, over and over between sobs.
"Don't cry, honey, A-Yang's right here," mom said soothingly when she noticed that Xue Yang was standing at the door.
"I don't want him!" A-Qing screamed and slipped away from mom's embrace, moving instead toward the window. At that point, Xue Yang was fairly sure that this was another of those night terrors, as his parents called it, and hoped she wouldn't start running around in circles because that always made him dizzy.
"I want my other older brother. This one's a bad boy! He hurt my eyes!" A-Qing went on screaming.
"Honey, your eyes were just fine a few hours ago, you watched cartoons before bed, remember? How many fingers do you see?" mom asked in concern, but A-Qing pointed at Xue Yang and repeated, "He hurt me, I don't want him! Where's my other older brother?"
"Dearie, you don't have any more brothers," mom told her gently, but A-Qing paid her no mind. She was, in fact, not even looking at her mother. She wasn't looking at Xue Yang, either.
Her eyes, no longer milky white but pale grey after her surgeries, were directed towards the window, where a bright full moon was visible behind the tree tops, swaying in the gentle summer breeze, and she seemed transfixed by that sight.
"What does this other older brother look like?" Xue Yang asked out of curiosity, even though he could feel that mom didn't like him doing that, probably thinking he was encouraging A-Qing's nonsense, and also blaming him for causing this in the first place by being violent with his sister earlier.
"He's got pretty, shiny long hair and wears a white dress, like a princess," A-Qing said absent-mindedly with her gaze still fixed at the moon, and the princess part made Xue Yang giggle. Then she added, still in that strange, dreamlike voice, "There's a white scarf over his eyes like he's playing blind man's buff."
Xue Yang's laughter died off, because something about that image really bothered him, even though he wasn't sure what.
"What's his name?" he asked. "What's that other brother of yours called?"
"Dao Zhang," A-Qing replied, and then suddenly lay back on her bed, put a pillow over her ear and closed her eyes. Her episode was clearly over.
Xue Yang had trouble falling asleep afterwards. He couldn't help but wonder about that other brother who was supposed to be better than him. He couldn't be all that great, the nine-year-old him thought, if he had such a stupid name – everyone knew that Zhang was a surname, not a first name. And dressing like a princess was also stupid if one was a guy.
He was purposely trying not to think about the scarf-over-eyes part, because it still made him anxious. He couldn't explain why, but it felt like something from those scary movies his parents wouldn't let him watch, even though he really wanted to.
He wouldn't have wanted to watch any scary movies on that particular night, though.
While Xue Yang was tossing and turning in his bed, he heard a strange soft metal click from the garden. It made him feel rather scared, because it was past midnight and he had never heard such a sound coming from the garden before, and his overexcited mind kept coming with some very unpleasant scenarios, such as the arrival of the type of aliens who'd want to poke at his insides, or an invasion of robots dead-set on exterminating the human race.
Xue Yang put his head under his blanket and seriously considered hiding under his bed, but in the end forced himself to walk over to the window and peek out. And then he breathed a sigh of relief, because it was just his mom.
She was standing there on the moonlit lawn, smoking a cigarette (the click that scared Xue Yang so badly had been caused by a Zippo lighter), which Xue Yang had never seen her do before, and only a few times after. Her face was tilted upwards and she was staring at the moon, just as intently as A-Qing did earlier.
Then a cloud passed over the moon, hiding her face in shadow. For a moment, it seemed to Xue Yang that she looked like a complete stranger, and not at all like his mom. Then the cloud drifted away, dispelling that illusion, even though Xue Yang still found it strange that she smoked.
…
When A-Qing finishes telling her version of this story – putting a lot of unnecessary emphasis on the fact Xue Yang wouldn't let her play with his Legos, in his opinion – Xiao Xingchen nods in understanding, and says, "It seems that your dream was actually a distorted memory of your past life. Daozhang was the way you used to address me."
"So you really were my brother?" A-Qing asks excitedly.
"No, not exactly. You, your brother and I used to live together, as a family of sorts, even though none of us were actually connected by blood. I suppose, however, that your past reincarnation saw me as an older brother, because I looked after you and was several years your senior, but not old enough to serve as a father figure for you."
"That'd be weird," A-Qing agrees. "So what happened to us? Something must've happened, 'cause otherwise you wouldn't be here, right?"
"A tragedy befell us," Xiao Xingchen tells her rather vaguely, which of course only serves to stir her curiosity further.
"Tragedy? What kind of tragedy? Did we die in a fire or something?"
"No," Xiao Xingchen says with a sigh. "My friend Song Lan came to visit me, and your brother…"
"I killed him," Xue Yang supplies. "Apparently the past me really hated your teacher."
"When it happened, I took my own life," Xiao Xingchen continues in a strained voice, "And then I found myself in your brother's home some thousand years later."
"But how?"
"Magic," Xue Yang replies laconically. "Or cultivation, if you want to be precise. You watch all those shows, so you should know this stuff better than me."
"Yeah, but that's TV. It's not supposed to be real," A-Qing protests.
"Tell me about it. You're not the one who got attacked by a zombie," Xue Yang says with a grimace.
"Fierce corpse," Xiao Xingchen corrects him.
"She was fierce alright," Xue Yang agrees.
"Okay, so cultivation is real," A-Qing says slowly. "It's a bit hard to accept, but I'm getting there. But why on earth did you hate Teacher Song so much? He's super nice."
"I had my reasons," Xue Yang mutters, sending a sideways glance Xiao Xingchen's way to see if the cultivator wants to elaborate on that. It looks like he doesn't. He seems to understand that some things are better left unsaid, which is a relief.
"A-Qing, could you please tell me more about Song Lan?" Xiao Xingchen asks instead. "How did you meet him?"
To Xue Yang's surprise, his sister blushes a little at that question.
"We met mid-January. I was a bit drunk–" she starts, but Xue Yang interrupts her right away.
"What do you mean, drunk in mid-January? Don't you dare tell me you went out partying during the total lockdown!" he accuses her, his hackles instantly rising. He knows how irresponsible A-Qing can be, but this is just too much.
"No, no, nothing like that," A-Qing hurries to deny his accusation. "It wasn't partying – well, not exactly."
"Explain this," Xue Yang commands.
"So it was the lockdown and I was going out of my mind from being stuck with my roommates for more than two weeks. I mean, they're not that bad in small doses, but they only ever want to talk boys and clothes, and I'm just not that basic."
Xue Yang has to admit this is true. Growing up, his sister paid a fair amount of attention to both boys and clothes, but her interests weren't limited to those two areas; her passion for foreign languages, in particular, goes way beyond looking cool while ordering beers in an Irish pub and singing American songs during karaoke. Speaking of music, he imagines that A-Qing's roommates also don't share her self-proclaimed refined tastes.
"So I was sick with boredom, and then it was Gill's birthday and I didn't want to just FaceTime with her, especially not with those two present, so I stole away on my bicycle and went to see her to her place."
"It was just the two of you there?" Xue Yang clarifies, feeling slightly relieved; he's already met Gillian, A-Qing's half-American classmate and best friend, and thinks she's not that bad, except for her love for hard liquor.
"Yep. We just talked for a few hours, and drank a little bit. Alright, maybe more than a little bit. But it wasn't that wild; I was still okay enough to ride back. I actually rode my bike once or twice when I was way drunker, and nothing happened."
"I'm so gonna tell mom," Xue Yang growls.
"No you're not, or I'll tell her that you did drugs while at uni," A-Qing threatens him.
Xue Yang grits his teeth at this. He only provided his sister with this particular blackmail material because he got drunk himself, after she made him go bar-hopping when she first moved to study in the Yi City. He used to be a chatty type of drunk; another reason why he mostly prefers to stay sober these days.
"So as I was saying, I'd have made it back just fine, but it turned out that it started freezing while I was at Gill's–" "What a surprise, freezing in January," Xue Yang pipes in sarcastically, "–so I didn't even make it out of Gill's apartment block before I slipped on the ice and fell off my bike. My leg got stuck underneath and I couldn't get it out, so I just sat there crying for a while."
"You really should lay off the booze," Xue Yang admonishes her again.
"I know," A-Qing surprises him by admitting, because that's a first. "That's what Teacher Song said, too."
Oh, right. That guy. Xue Yang got so distracted by his sister's misbehavior that he completely forgot about him.
"Where does Song Lan come into this, anyway?" he asks presently.
"He lives in the same housing community as Gill does. He overheard me crying under his window and came down to help me. Took me to his place, bandaged my grazed knee and made me some tea. And then he drove me to my dorm."
"You went home with a complete stranger?" Xue Yang exclaims in horror. "He could've murdered you! Ain't you just getting the chills now that you know that the guy did, in fact, murder his neighbors?"
"He seemed like a nice guy," A-Qing says, brushing off Xue Yang's completely justified concerns with a shrug. "My intuition told me I could trust him, so I did. Before he left, he said that if I wanted to keep wandering alone after dark like that, I should learn some self-defense, and left me his business card. I decided that he had a point and when the lockdown lifted a bit, I started to attend his Kung Fu classes."
"I kept telling you the same thing and you never listened," Xue Yang complains.
"No, you didn't," A-Qing objects hotly. "You told me I should sit on my ass at home, just like you."
"It's a fucking pandemic. Everyone should sit on their asses at home if they can help it," Xue Yang grumbles, annoyed that his sister has taken a total stranger's advice while she kept ignoring Xue Yang's for years.
"This was very like Song Lan, to help someone in need," Xiao Xingchen observes with a clear fondness in his voice. "And how did you find him as your teacher? You know, the Song Lan I knew dreamed about starting his own cultivation school. It was a dream we shared."
"He's strict and makes us run way too many laps, but he's also very patient. I've learned lots thanks to him," A-Qing replies, and then proceeds to ask Xiao Xingchen about the past version of her teacher.
The cultivator gladly obliges her, telling A-Qing about his travels with his friend, supplying various stories about the monsters they fought and people they helped.
Normally, Xue Yang would love to hear Little Starfish talk so animatedly about something because it doesn't happen often enough; that something being Song Lan, however, rather spoils the experience. It doesn't take long before Xue Yang decides that he has heard enough about how strong, kind, brave and generally wonderful Xiao Xingchen's friend is, and rises from his chair.
"I'm gonna go check on my bike," he mutters, not caring how lamely it sounds, and throws his wallet on the table. "Use that when they give you the bill," he tells A-Qing and leaves, not waiting for her reply.
When he gets to his motorcycle, which is of course right where he parked it – it's not like this particular model is exactly a thief-magnet – Xue Yang kicks an empty beer can lying next to it in a fit of helpless rage, and then just leans against his bike with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his leather jacket, trying to get his turbulent emotions under control.
Right now, he immensely regrets his spontaneous offer to find Song Lan. When he made it, he thought they'd just check that the guy was okay. He didn't even think that Xiao Xingchen would try to befriend Song Lan again, because that'd be awkward without explaining everything and he couldn't imagine that turning out well.
Xue Yang definitely didn't count on Song Lan being entangled in some sort of freaky crime, much less on his sister knowing him.
Because of these two things, if they ever do find Song Lan and manage to set him free, it will actually be much easier for Xiao Xingchen to explain things to him, and thus for Song Lan to become friends with the cultivator in this life. Then sooner or later, Xiao Xingchen will want to move in with his friend, because he'd surely prefer his company over someone he considers his enemy.
Song Lan's building is horrible, true, but maybe he'll move somewhere else for his friend's sake. As he will probably lose his current job at the Wang's School of Martial Arts, he will need to find a new one, so it is possible that he will move to a different city, taking Xiao Xingchen with him.
And Xue Yang will never see Xiao Xingchen again.
For some reason, this thought makes it difficult for him to breathe.
He also realizes that the hands in his pockets have turned into fists, and forces himself to unclench his fingers. He feels rather disgusted with himself, working himself up like that over some stupid imaginary scenarios that might never come to pass. If Xue Yang's lucky enough, chances are that Song Lan belongs among the unfortunate thousands of people disappeared by the government every year, and not even Jiggy's connections will help them in this respect. Xiao Xingchen will be understandably disappointed, but he'll get used to it eventually, while knowing that Xue Yang has done everything in his power to find his friend.
Xue Yang nods in satisfaction, noticing that the pressure on his chest has lifted. When A-Qing and Xiao Xingchen emerge from the coffee shop a moment later, he's able to act more or less normal.