like a place i could return to.
(on missing a home that no longer exists.)
Nearly eight hundred years into his second ascension and subsequent banishment, Xie Lian hasn’t yet learned how to unlearn missing home.
In his travels, he comes across many people. Little kids who take to him like a moth to flame. Cultivators who sense that he has power in him and cultivators who don’t. Mothers and grandmothers who think he’s a young runaway from home, and during times of war and unrest, a young refugee, even, and welcome him into their homes, insisting he cannot be alone for as long as he remains in the area.
Xie Lian does not say it, but those are his favorite kind of people. The kind who do not care what he looks like or what assumptions can be made about him, or the correct assessment that he’s a bit of an odd duck, and simply see a young man in need of some rest and maybe some company. Though he does not say it, he is hundreds of years older than they are and he longs for company so very desperately it cracks at his voice and he has to breathe for long moments before he remembers how to speak again.
They welcome him into their homes, and he eats meals with them, warm and hearty and filling, and he remembers the luxurious meals he was served in the palaces of Xianle. They ask if he wants second helpings and though his stomach has shrunken and he no longer has the capacity to eat as much as he used to, he agrees, for he isn’t the picky, spoiled prince who never worried about food anymore. He can eat anything, and even the worst of the food he comes across cannot quite compare to the atrocities his mother tried her very best at.
(There is no way to replicate them except to try his own hand, and it does not taste the same.)
He longs for the taste of Xianle food, the snacks and the staples he took for granted as a prince, yet he has no talent of his own and his memory is rather insistent on scattering holes and gouges across itself, and who in living memory can remember anything but the bloody downfall of Xianle?
The people who take him in try to keep him entertained, sometimes, and this is often how he learns about the currently favored kinds of song and dance and storytelling, and it’s such great fun, yet he misses the song and dance and storytelling of nearly eight centuries ago and who is going to sing to him if not himself, and who will witness him dance or listen to him telling stories if not Ruoye? He smiles and claps and there is something hollow ringing in his chest if he allows himself to think about it, so he does not think about it. He soothes Ruoye under his sleeve and allows himself to fall into merriment and joy.
(Even the language is not the same. The little quirks, the turns of phrase, the idioms, not even the gutter-rat slang—none of it is the same.)
(He is so lonely, and somehow allowing himself to reach out for people makes him lonelier.)
And when he falls asleep at night, he often dreams of better days. Sometimes he dreams of Wuming, sometimes he dreams of a mother’s warm embrace and a father’s approving smile with a hand laid upon his head, and he wakes up crying, Ruoye fluttering around in an attempt to soothe him in return. Regardless of whether he is comfortable or not, he wakes every once in a while longing for what is not there anymore, and really, what else is there to do but calm himself down and simply carry on?
Xie Lian is an old, old god, and he misses home. He’s lived such a very long life and he does not know how to unlearn missing that which he destroyed himself.
(also on ao3.)