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“Haven’t you, Xiaoqiu ?” Cicada says fondly, and Zephyr finds it very hard to breathe.
But there is no time for half-taken breaths, for regrets and reminiscence, and the sudden tightness in her chest must be due to Ku’s ‒ no, Xiaoqiu’s, she would never have let you call her that but she’s no longer Ku and you’re no longer you ‒ overenthusiastic squeeze against Crow’s fragile frame. She lets herself seep into petty hatred, just for a moment, at the state at which he’s kept this body that barely functions as a sack of bones and feels as if it could be blown apart by any stray gust of wind.
She hates him just because of that. Because of his betrayal, his infuriating pride, his insistence to haunt her from even beyond the grave, and he couldn’t even leave her with a good body to betray him back from.
Internalizing a set of facts quickly is easy if you don’t think about them very much. Plug your nose and swallow it down, like a vial of bitter medicine that you haggled half your savings for when your sister is red with fever and the winter will only get colder.
Is there a difference, in the end?
The advisor speaks.
Zephyr becomes Crow again.
The servants have left. Sikou Hai will arrive in an hour. Zephyr is climbing up the ramparts, and the staircase is dark and smells of must.
The walls of Taohui are old, made of mud-baked bricks and caked with dust. It comes away in clean streaks as Zephyr grips the cracks between them for support as she climbs, and falls onto the grimier steps, another addition to the filth coating the hem of her robes. If Zephyr had been wearing her own, the difference would have been stark, making a mockery of the white silk. Maybe Crow was the more pragmatic one. Even squinting at the hem from so close up, the dirt is neatly hidden among the shreds of black.
The hem. On the ground. The ground is cold. And hard. Her knee burns with the effort of trying to stand up, before a hacking set of coughs doubles her over again. When did she fall? She can’t remember. She grabs blindly at the wall, but it's difficult to see because her eyes are suddenly blurry. Her back settles against something hard. A wall.
It’s instinctive, the way that her knees come to tuck against her chest, the way her hand clamps over her mouth so that there is no sound that accompanies her heaving frame. Even in a different body, she still remembers how to make herself small.
Ku, you can’t! Quilin had once whispered and held her sister’s trembling frame in her arms so she couldn’t run after the older urchins kicking weeks of building ‒ it was just a lean-to, in a corner that they thought they wouldn’t care to check, but it was home ‒ into shards of wood and cloth. They had to be small, then, when they couldn’t fight couldn’t run could only hide and endure. Quilin hated it. She yearned for control, to be the one pulling the strings from high above, watching the little people scrabble about in their alleyways like ants.
Zephyr is a god, and she has not been small in a very long time.
But it was always her , wasn’t it? She thought she had let go. She thought that she didn’t care, anymore, and “old strategist” instead of “Zephyr” or “sister” on Ku’s lips only stings a little more than Dewdrop’s disappointed eyes. Ku isn’t her real sister, Dewdrop is, so why can she numb her heart to one and not the other?
Her hand is wet.
“I didn’t think the mighty Zephyr could be reduced to such a state. Crying in a stairwell.” A voice cuts in, cold as the wind, and her head jerks up. Crow is there, leaning against the wall above her. “You’ve met Xiaoqiu before.”
The word is soft in his mouth; well-worn, and rounded by a thousand calls of Xiaoqiu, Xiaoqiu . Zephyr thinks of the haughty tilt of Ku’s chin, the quiet sharpness of her eyes and the height to which she holds herself, dropped faster than the beat of a hummingbird’s wings as she rushed into Crow’s arms without abandon. The tightness to which she embraced him, as if she had been drowning for all the time they had been apart and he was her breath of air. Ku knows Crow. Zephyr can imagine them, in a mellow summer pavilion, sitting across a table of wéiqí as Crow maneuvers his black pieces and points out the holes in her defenses; Ku looks up with eager eyes and calls him Shifu. In the crisp autumn breeze of a lantern festival, following her mentor through the crowd, she looks longingly at the delicate sugar animals propped up on bamboo skewers and Crow, noticing, calls Laoban, get us this one, please.
What was it in her eyes when they had embraced only because one of them was lying? Love? Love, and the relief at seeing a loved one alive and whole, Zephyr knows, because Ku had never worn that look on her face when she was with her.
In an instant, Zephyr knows, that if it was Crow who had fallen on the street so long ago, Ku would not have kept running.
“You knew how she felt about you.” Crow notes. He bends down to her height, confused. “So why‒ ”
“ Shut up ‒” Zephyr hisses and her cheeks are damp and the darkness is suffocating and all she wants to be for one single moment of her miserable existence is away from him because its his fault his fault his fault Ku loves him and not her ‒
If Zephyr had been born Quilin instead of an interloper in her body, would Ku have looked at her in that same way? Would she have asked after her when she was away, and when she returned would she have said ‘is it safe’ with such a tone as if if it weren’t her body would shatter into a thousand pieces so she could hug her again? Crow took her pride, her victory, her life, and fooled her like a naive girl into thinking that there was something between them. Zephyr would let him break it all again ‒ would place it in his hands and watch him do it ‒ if it meant he wouldn’t take Ku from her too.
Crow is silent.
Zephyr would rather he scream. If he yelled and berated her for being such a coward and a liar that she is, then she could justify hating him back. But it’s the concern in the gentle crease of his brow, as he kneels in front of her and reaches a hand towards her face, that freezes her to the spot. She can’t move. Her limbs won’t obey her, and she is too numb to flinch. All she can do is stare into his ghostly eyes, and think: he looks so tired. He looks so tired.
His fingers skim the tear trailing down her face.
His hand passes through the curve of her cheek.
For everything that’s passed, they’ve never really been able to touch, have they?
She lets out a choked sob, and he recoils.
“It’s alright that you hate me.” He says quietly. “Just another sin for the list, isn’t it?”
It feels like a long time before Zephyr gets up again, but internally she knows that any longer than three-hundred and twenty-two-seconds will have the others wondering if she was ambushed on the way up. She doesn’t look at Crow as she stands, clumsily clutching the wall for support, and fixes her hair and face.
Her throat is dry, and for a moment she imagines speaking: words breathed in so small a sliver of breath that even if he heard them, he wouldn't show any sign of doing so.
“It’s not your fault.”
She doesn't. She wishes it weren’t true.