It's been a while since Syaoran has been here.
Almost everything is as they'd left it the morning before everything happened. The clean pot they'd washed after breakfast, like they did every morning, so that they could cook whenever they were hungry, the drawing they'd had drawn of the two of them by a travelling merchant as a thank you for helping them after their cart wheel broke, the pile of books, some written by other, some in progress, theorising on the purpose of the ruins and what their significance had been originally as opposed to now, their change of clothes, neatly folded next to the roll-out bed they usually shared, the wash basin which has dried up in the time he's been gone.
The boy touches the pot.
They'd had a porridge that morning, made it different with some pieces of dried apple from the market on their last trip. They'd been running low. Syaoran had cooked it while his dad had been organising things with some of the workers who were already awake.
He'd smiled when he came back, like he always did, and thanked him.
It almost makes him cry to remember but he swallows, holding it back for a moment before it escapes as an unavoidable prickling in his eyes.
He tries to accept it and let it happen.
He remembers that his dad had taken off the folded clothes in the dark, washed them in the basin, hung them up outside while they slept so that the desert winds and the sun the next day could freshen them up.
Someone else must have folded them away, after the accident, put them on top of the smaller clothes beneath, his own.
He doesn't know why it didn't occur to him to take them with him.
He'd been taken in initially by the wife of one of the workers who lives in the town.
She'd been nice, accommodating and more than happy to do anything and everything for him.
He feels like he disappointed her in some way, something in the way she frowned at him when he offered to help with things around the house and how she kept shooing him back to bed for the first few days.
She'd said that he didn't need to make any decisions right now, that she would be happy to help him train in something else, could find someone to teach him to paint or farm or make carts instead of going back.
He'd thought about it, genuinely, for a few days but the decision was clear to him- he couldn't abandon his father's dream or his research.
When news had finally reached the castle he'd stayed there for the remainder of the time before he'd returned, two week, three, a month perhaps?
Time escaped him there.
He knows that he has a lot of feelings about Sakura and that the princess is his best friend but he found it difficult to be around her, to be expected to talk by her.
At the beginning he'd wanted some time alone. Syaoran thinks that it was more on the part of her brother than herself that he was allowed this. She still managed to sneak in at odd hours, catching him crying or crying herself until an adult came and pulled her away to something or other, an offer they extended to him though he could tell that they didn't expect him to accept it.
She'd offered too, that he could live in the castle, with her, take on some kind of role here or just be a ward of the country.
She'd cried again, quieter, when he'd explained that he needed to keep moving forwards and held her hands.
The second time he tried he thinks she understood that he can't stay still, that he can't let his grief hold him.
The boy smiles, sniffing a little and wiping away the tears. He puts on his dad's goggles, collects up his tools and sets out to find out where the progress is on the dig.