a/n: 1. i don't own Twilight. 2. we step back in time to Edward's "peace corps" days in China this chapter (the heart fail comes next chapter) - special fact about me, i speak chinese. 3. thanks to gallantcorkscrews for encouraging the Daoist stuff. 4. ElleCC is worship-able. Thanks for beta'ing, m'dear. :-)

There is nothing you can do about the world.
You can only follow what is natural in pushing the myriad things ahead.
There is no getting to the bottom of the changes they undergo.
You can only grasp the essential destination and lead them there.
— Huai Nanzi

He remembers her explanations clearer than she ever explained them.

Memory does that, he knows.

Societies are systems. Steps built by generations. By professions passed down from parent to child. By stones upon stones that form low walls, then high walls, which someday shape themselves into cities.

There are a Few, she had said, among any society, who don't belong to these steps.

And yet, and here she frowned, we demand, "Sing, little bird. Dance-dance. You get three very, very generous weeks of holiday!"

Some of the Few will bend, she explained, her smile secretive, but others will not. They shall slide between the bars like ghosts. They will steal the key, kick down the jail house door, and ride toward the horizon with the breeze on their backs and adventure as their sturdy mounts.

The rest he knows is his own imaginings, the relic of grief: her eyes, though showing early wrinkles, are bright and healthy. Her voice not coming from her lips but from the melody of the stringed instrument being plucked by her fingers.

Join us, we Few. Join us, he hears her strum.

Set out:

Let the strings and arrows fling loose like a sail unfurled with the first breath of wind.

Rise with the sun.
Drink with the moon.
Sleep with the cloudy droll of midday.

May only death wake you.

When he first arrives, there's the long plane ride. Then, there's the way people smell different—it's hard to distinguish but there's the absence of that western powdery scent and the prevalence of a much brinier tinge of perspiration. Then there's the sheer number of people. The colors, too, are a shock. Though the sky seems to be a continuous, musty gray, the rainbow catching his eye from the street vendors is a swirl of Hello Kitty pink and New Year red and rising sun yellow. People are everywhere. People. School boys hold hands without any hesitation. The bicycle rickshaws battle for the streets with the taxicabs. He learns to assume that any dish could make his mouth either burn or go numb or both. Everything is cheaper, and yet everyone is trying to charge him so much more. So many people.

Overtime, he leaves the tourist behind (one can only see a Giant panda a dozen times...) and becomes a student of it all. Yao-Yao helps with her eager explanations. By and by, he understands it better. Every university student he meets is half-begging, "would you like to be my English language partner, please?" The old ladies are sour-faced because in their Confucian youth they had to defer to every elder—but now these post-communist youth have no manners. The youth don't defer, so the old ladies are harsh: they demand deference with their brittle elbows. He's taller than almost everyone—and it's a regular joke. Shorter men hold their hands up, hopping as if to tease him about his height, and even though his Chinese isn't good enough to understand their words, they speak to him like he gets every syllable. Finally, there are the girls. They ask to take his picture. They bat their eyelashes and ask him questions and won't leave until he excuses himself by tapping his watch and running away. It's always leaves him with a feeling of no space—and he thought he'd adjusted to the usual crush of things.

At first, he comes to Chengdu at every opportunity. He comes with Alice and Jasper at first. Eventually he drags along Yao-Yao. Then after some time, they feel no need to visit the city except for supplies.

Edward meets Yao-Yao because she teaches music in his village. She grew up in the village, but then she left and ran off to Canton for ten years. She'd wanted to be in the Opera, and she had been—eventually. She learned English there. She'd also gotten sick there.

Edward, Alice, and Jasper all teach English at middle schools in the rural villages for Peace Corps. He and Jasper are at one school. Alice teaches at the school to the North.

Alice is in love with Jasper.

Yao-Yao is the one who makes Edward realize this. They are listening to young Cao Meng attempt a village ditty on the reed pipe while Yao-Yao argues her point. "She visits every week."

"We are the only other Americans in a forty-mile radius."

"She loves him," Yao-Yao repeats. "When she sees him, look at her. Her eyes do not hide her love."

"They haven't known each other that long."

She shrugs. "How long do two sides of the same heart need?"

Edward rolls his eyes at the cheesiness, but then, the next time Alice visits, Edward looks.

Yao-Yao is right.

"As usual."

She laughs when he admits it to her. Then, Yao-Yao coughs a lot. He lightly hits her back and hands her a cloth as he always does.

"You are so good," she says, nodding and smiling warmly at him through the cloth over her mouth.

"Are you taking the medicine that my dad sent?" he asks with concern.

"I take it 'as directed,'" she jokes in her "American accent voice," but her joking is a cover—and they both know it. If the medicine isn't working that means... Edward doesn't let himself think about it. The medicine would have only slowed it down, anyway. He refuses to ponder the futility.

Yao-Yao always tells him that words like "futility" are used by people trying to justify being already dead. Yao-Yao's still composing new songs, about which she smiles and insists, "There's nothing dead about that."

That night, they all get drunk on liquor bought from the "China Tobacco Wine" shop.

At some point, Alice is lost in conversation with Yao-Yao, and Edward gets a chance to bug Jasper.

"So, Jasper, my comrade." Edward flings an arm over Jasper's shoulder. "Do you like Alice in a..." He trails off, forgetting what he was going to say.

Jasper looks at Edward for a second, before rolling his eyes and repeating back to him, "Do I like Alice in a...?"

"Oh, right, right! Do you like Alice in a sexual way?"

Jasper stares at him.

Edward is certain that he's been misunderstood, so he explains, "I mean, do you like want to fuck and hang out with her and fuck and smile and all that?"

Jasper's face flattens, and then he pushes Edward's arm off his shoulder and starts to stand.

"It's just that she loves you," Edward tries to explain, though his vowels sound all oblong. Jasper needs to understand.

Jasper stops mid-stand and then sits back down again on the bench. "What did you say?"

"Well, I know she's ga-ga for you—but the question is: are you ga-ga for her?" Edward holds his glass high in the air and gives Jasper the "so take that!" look.

Jasper is seemingly affected by Edward's question. He's quiet for a moment, but then he whispers, "Yeah, I like Alice," and then he grins and turns to face Edward and says, "in a sexual way that makes me want to see her smile."

Edward laughs and then slams down his glass. "I KNEW it!" he cheers, and the fluid inside his glass sloshes and spills onto the table.

Jasper is shaking his head in amusement. "Man, we need to fucking get you hydrated and in bed. Why the hell did you drink so much?" He's already shoving a glass of water into Edward's hands and dumping Edward's cup of bai-jiu beneath the bench.

Why did he drink so much? Edward ponders. Then he recalls, and his face falls. "Yao-Yao is sick. It makes me sad."

Jasper knows this, but he's not as close to her as Edward is, so he simply nods and pats Edward on the back. "I know," is all that Jasper says in a soft voice.

They both continue drinking water, and then Jasper asks, "Do you miss her?"

Yao-Yao isn't gone yet. "Who?"

"Your fiancée?"

"Oh, sure I do, but we email."

"You never talk about her."

"Oh, that's bad isn't it?"

"Shit, Edward. Let's get you to bed."

"Goo-ood idea."

. . . . . .. .

He's woken in the middle of the night by the sound of heavy breathing and a faint thumping.

Jasper and Edward share a room in one-room apartment by the river. The view between their beds is obscured by a tall bamboo screen.

Edward has a headache. The noises aren't helping. He almost protests the sounds, but then his ear begins to decipher the general thrust of the conversation.

"Why—didn't—you—say—something? I—"

"Shhhh."

"Shhhh," is hissed and giggled back. "I'm just so happy."

A gasp.

"Do that again."

Gasp.

"Again."

A female moan.

"Shhhh."

"You think Edward might wake up?"

"Edward was singing Bon Jovi to a rock—he's out cold."

"Then why are you shushing me?"

"Shhh."

A light slap sound. Then a giggle. In his sleepy haze, Edward expects to hear some further rejoinder, but instead, there are only the more subtle sounds of the springs in the mattress creaking and those odd noises of lovemaking, like slurps and wheezy breaths and squeaky kisses. Edward is drunk and sleepy enough that he almost goes back to sleep, but then he hears a, "Yes. I said yes," followed by another loud squeak of springs. "Yes, please, yes. Yes. Just slow. It's been..."

Then there is a gasp.

A masculine whisper of, "Sweet Jesus."

Lots of heavy breathing.

The squeaks of mattress grow loud. There is a dull thumping against the wood wall.

Edward has a partial erection. He can't help it. He is listening to sex. Naturally, his lower machinery is interested but too alcohol laden to go full mast—which is the worst—so he makes himself imagine any number of nasty memories: Emmett farting. The taste of rancid milk with tea. Fat, pocked-marked old men baring their stomachs.

But the foulness isn't sticking—what sticks are the slapping, squeaking sounds. At first, Edward simply trusts Jasper's endurance to be shit after not having gotten any in a long-ass time, but then Jasper is proving to be a Texan stallion, so Edward gives up and tries to imagine nothing and nothing and nothing. He is almost there until he hears Alice go soprano at the same time that he hears Jasper supply the staccato-grunted base line. Edward covers his ears with his pillow, but it's no use.

Then, there are just the quiet sounds of breathing.

Some moments later, Edward is beginning to drift off again when he hears the exchange of words.

"I love you."

"I love you, too. I love you," she whispers her reply in the dark.

With those words hanging in the air, Edward lets drunken sleep pull him under.

. … . ……. . . . .

Yao-Yao collapses one late fall morning. She was holding a zither, which released a clang-zing-rang as if to herald her finale.

Edward gets Wu Bo to drive her, Jasper, and himself to the hospital in Chengdu.

They tell him they will make her comfortable.

His idea of comfortable and the hospital staff's don't seem to match, but Yao-Yao tells him, "Get a chair and cup of tea—or I'll get out of my bed and get one for you."

He gets them both tea; himself, a chair.

He's at her side for three days. They discuss many things: his family, her past, Rosalie, what is meaningful, and what is not.

"What will you miss?" he asks from his bedside stool.

"Everything and nothing," Yao-Yao intones in a fake, sotto voice, and then she laughs before he can protest her answer.

He crosses his arms and gives her a patient look.

She smiles back. "I will miss you," she promises, and she reaches out her hand to cover the top of his. "I will miss the children, all of the students and their young smiles. Also, I will miss my songs." Then, she gives a cough and murmurs, "But I will not miss the pain. I wish I could clap my hands and make this quick." Edward blanches at her words, so she reassures him again, "I will miss you, but you should not dwell. I want you to 'go with the flow,' kiss many, many pretty girls with a lot of tongue, and you will forget me soon enough."

"I would not..."

"I mean that I want you happy. That is why I give you all this talk of rivers and dreams."

"Remarkably, I caught that."

She laughs again. Then, another round of hoarse coughing. She covers her mouth with the sterile cloth until the hacking ceases. In a dry voice, she continues, "So, yes, like I told you. Rivers and flows, so once I'm gone—"

"Yao-Yao," Edward scolds.

"—just go for a swim in the river. I'll be there. Maybe, in my next life, I am at the river, and I have no clothes." She puts her finger on her lips and tries but fails to look innocent.

He's shaking his head at her, but he's smirking. "You're incorrigible."

She gives him a confused look. She doesn't know the word.

"Unfixable. Unable to be tamed," he defines.

"Ah. Good." She grins, nodding approvingly. "That is the way to be."

"Oh, Yao-Yao…" Edward sighs even as he smiles.

I will miss this, he knows.

As they sit there in perfect understanding, Edward realizes how soon it will slip away.

He closes his eyes, but the tears leak out anyway.

Yao-Yao doesn't hesitate. She pats him on the hand, gives a shake of the head, and insists, "Not that. Not now."

"I'm sorry," Edward replies.

"No sorry. Let it go. Try not to think and think and think."

"I always over-think everything."

"I know. This is why I laugh."

He laughs, too, then.

. … . ……. . . . .

When he wakes up the following morning, she does not.

As the medics prepare to take her from the room, he gives her lifeless hand a final squeeze.

So long, my friend. But then he stops in the middle of the room. He looks at the empty bed and then looks out the window to the permanent white of the sky. Down the long hill he can see the great river flowing at the base of the valley.

A smirk lassos his mouth. Yao-Yao and her inside jokes.

. … . ……. . . . .