6: Recollection
There is too much going on for much more than an hour of sleep. Indeed, there is too much going on for even an extra breath, or so he feels. The heat of the night and the fevered dreams that visit when sleep does are by no means pleasant bedfellows.
Perhaps that's why he sits almost painfully awake in his tent, with only feeble candlelight to see by. The stick of charcoal in his hand fits its shape almost as well as his spear does, and it glides across the surface of the parchment before him with as much, if not more, precision.
"Zilong," comes a voice outside his tent. "What are you still doing awake?" The flap is raised, and a comrade's face comes into his view. An eyebrow lifts at the sight of the brush in his hand. "Are you writing?"
"Writing, Mengqi? No." He smiles, knowing and accepting that he has never had a flair for the word, that he prefers to draw his thoughts. Drawing makes them his own in a way the written word never could. "Just… thinking."
"Is that so?" Mengqi steps into the tent with the familiarity of a trusted friend, closing the flap behind him and moving to sit. "I should like to see when you've finished."
"They're only little things, just for myself, really." He shakes his head and hands the parchment over. "But have a look, if you will."
The scenes on the paper are quickly sketched everyday scenes, but drawn just so that the observer sees them in a different, unexplainable light. Mengqi can only guess at what its artist, normally so candid and honest, was thinking as he drew.
On one side, boys play at ball in an unfamiliar town, with the curved roofs of houses to serve as their background and a broad avenue before them. It brings a small smile unbidden to his face as he remembers doing such things when he was no older than they, free of the burden he shoulders now. However, it's the drawing on the other half of the page that catches his attention and refuses to let go.
Leaves fall in the foreground, while further back a gnarled, twisted tree reaches high with branching arms. Beneath it stands the slender figure of what he assumes is a woman, her face turned away, veiled by a long cloak of hair…
"Nostalgia," Mengqi whispers, his mouth quirking upward into the faintest of smirks. "Who is she?"
"She…?"
"This lady here." His thumb brushes over the faint outline of the woman in the picture. "Who is she?"
A shrug. "A friend from my youth."
"A friend?" Mengqi isn't one to tease, but this opportunity is golden, too much to pass up. "Or a lover?"
"Hardly a lover." Zilong chuckles, nudging his friend's shoulder with an elbow. "Perhaps more like a sister."
"Do you see her often?"
"It's been years. We weren't much more than children when we met last."
"You should go see her, then, when the opportunity arises." The smirk softens. "It never hurts to return to one's roots once in a while."
He shakes his head, remembering an old, rash promise made by another him in another life. "She wouldn't remember me."
"You think so?"
"I know so."
Mengqi laughs at this. "You'd be surprised. But no matter." He rises. "It's late. I'll take my leave of you now, else I fall off my horse in the morning from lack of sleep. Good night, Zhao Yun."
"Good night."
He is still awake long after Mengqi leaves, the drawing in his hand, even as his eyes grow heavy and the sky darkens as it will before the dawn. He sighs, raising the piece of parchment to the candle flame.
"Return to my roots? Maybe, one of these days. But not right now. I'm sorry."
The paper's edges catch fire. It flares briefly for one vivid second, like a dying star, and crumbles into flecks of ash, stark white against the darkness. As he has done with so many others before it, he sweeps the pile to the ground. Only then does he retire to the sticky heat and the dreams that he earlier tried so hard to avoid. They are better known to him than his own heart.