Archive of Our Own ^beta

They check the village twice for signs of remaining life, or un-life, because as skilled as the two of them might be at reading chi, the damned read as cold and dead as stone. If anything their presence triggers an absence of the Pulse, as if their frames actively repel the energy of the universe. But one hears sound over silence and light over darkness.

Absence, by definition, refuses to be defined.

Digging her automail blade into the wooden door of the storehouse, Lan Fan slices through. A few decaying corpses pile near the door, blackened hands curled inwards like withered trees in the dead of winter. She kicks at their faces and the overripe fruits of their heads collapse in on themselves. A stench she would liken to rotten soft cheese drifts upwards. Pausing for another second to confirm a lack of movement, Lan Fan drags the corpses outside and adds them to the bonfire in the village centre. Pads inside.

Opens her bags of supplies, almost lethally light.

She scans the storehouse: Rice. Dried herbs, preserved fruits and vegetables, dried or smoked or salted meat waiting within. With a prayer to whatever ancestors or gods have sent luck to wing her feet, Lan Fan crouches down and begins to fill the bags, hers, May’s, and Ling’s, with a breathless abandon. After a few moments she feels Ling’s presence in the stream of chi. “We’re clear,” he says. “The rest of the village is dead. Dead dead. Deader than dead.”

She tenses her fingers around the fold of his loose collar and takes a kiss that tastes of grit and mud and crickets. He pushes against her chest. Runs his hand through the loose fringe of his uncut bangs. “Oh, and another thing. We kind of found a kid.”

It’s been, as far as Lan Fan can recall, a year since communications cut off with Amestris. Ten months since the first reports of demons began in the western border of XIng. Six since Xijing fell; five since the trio has been travelling steadily to the east and to the north. Quartet, counting Xiao Mei. Refuge in Ronshito or in the northern snow forests appears the ideal option: While heat spurs the demons onwards, the cold seems to settle them into indolence. The cold or the dark. No one can tell. And so the heavens have played the greatest trick upon man. His weapon of choice, and the Emperor’s sigil, of enlightening, empowering flame—little effect but to drive the damned forward. To escape death, then, they must seek its companions.

May cradles the child when Lan Fan and Ling arrive before the bonfire. Desiccated flesh peeling away. Husked bones darkening. In the crackle of the cleansing flames, Lan Fan imagines the deities to cast down their net of gold and reel in the souls of they who suffered to their final breaths. The plague that has pockmarked the land in craters of ash bears no banner of creation, no message of warning, no prophecy of conclusion.

Perhaps the gods have forsaken them. Perhaps the Promised Day has wrought its power after all, with the Amestrisian epicentre, and the mere humans that remain will do far too little far too late.

“What shall we name her?” May asks.

“I was thinking Niu,” supplies Ling with a faint smile, and May counters with a solemn glare. “What about Qiang? Always liked that name. Wasn’t that the name of the Liu sister anyway? Or Xi Feng. I love the name Xi Feng. Xi Feng, you like that name, don’t you?”

Impatiently Lan Fan indicates the bags. With her usual calm she rattles off the current list of supplies, touching the tip of each finger as she names the item in turn. “—and we should refill the waterskins and wineskins, and possibly see if we can salvage any clothing or blankets for the coming winter.”

May passes the burden to Ling, who caresses it with one hand supporting the curve of its back and the other the roundness of its hairless head. Stepping forward, the former princess of the Chang Clan sinks to her knees in the grey dirt. A sparkling ember smoulders in the silt prior to extinguishing in a wispy trail of smoke. “Please? Lan Fan, you don’t understand: We’ve never found anyone alive before. That means we’re almost out of the danger zone. Almost ahead of the sickness.” Lan Fan shoulders the bags. The straps crisscross an X over her chest, marking the heart already brimming with need for two very specific people in her life. People upon whom she decided long ago. Years ago, when she left for Amestris. Years later, when she left for Xing, losing one and gaining another. And now the both halves of her heart stand together, united, asking for her to somehow carve another hole in her already too-taut chest.

May’s fingers are coiling painfully around her ankles. “Look, the deaths here were fresh, not even a few days old if she’s managed to survive, and she’s healthy. This a sign from the gods. I can feel it in her chi.”

All Lan Fan feels in the chi are the silver ribbons connecting Ling and May to the child. Thin and wavering, but already there. Yet May remains on her knees, hands burning shackles around Lan Fan’s flesh as though her palms could brand divine fire into her skin. Exhaling, Lan Fan slowly folds her legs, lowering herself until the backs of her thighs balance on her lower legs, and tilts May’s chin up. Her kiss tastes of grit and mud and crickets, but also hope. Hope, thrumming in the unusually active chi that twists in on itself into crooked half-hearts of divine promise lashing outwards from her corporeal form to ride the Pulse of the bonfire.

Funny, really, how it took the apocalyptic destruction of the entire nation for Lan Fan’s avarice to awaken.

“You shouldn’t have named it,” she snaps, and May’s smile echoes Ling’s with such striking similarity that screams their shared blood in Lan Fan’s ear. “It’ll be that much more difficult when reality catches up.”

May bursts out laughing and the universe rightens, brightens, if only for this brief respite from the shadows cobwebbing their future. “You’re too easy to convince!” Touching Lan Fan’s jaw with her palms, May draws her in for another kiss, a pepper of kisses like the silver pepper of stars in the midnight sky. “Just gotta show you my heart and yours melts. Mm, just like the Emperor back there was.”

“Arguably, you are a rather persuasive and insistent little panda, eh,” Ling adds, having dug through the pack to get at the rice. White pearls of wisdom in his palm. His brow furrows. “Rice soup for Xi Feng, do you think?”

“Oi, I haven’t agreed to that of all names yet! Not everything is phoenixes, Ling!” But May has already beat the path to Ling’s side.

“That’s Xi Feng. See, there’s a little bit of Xiao Mei in there too, for your li’l pandas.” As Xiao Mei sinks her teeth on his finger he yelps. Without dropping the child. Without dropping Xi Feng.

Lan Fan breathes outwards and with it the fight escapes from her chest. Lungs deflating. Collapsing. “Don’t make me change my mind,” she starts to say, but no one is listening, or everyone is and she has shut her ears to their replies.

That evening, the first in a little over two weeks that the trio—quartet, counting Xiao Mei—have not constantly travelled on foot, Lan Fan appeases that foreign current of avarice under her tongue. Not quite the Greed that sneered with Ling’s mouth and tore apart human souls with Ling’s hands, but more of a want, a need, to affirm that she is still alive. That a pulse still beats. That the steadily wearing-down automail of her right arm has not spread over her body, converting tissue to steel, rewiring veins to circuitry, transmuting Lan Fan to some unfeeling guardian spirit keeping the two halves of her heart alive.

She needs to know who she is. What she is. Lan Fan, Lan Fan, Lan Fan.

At least jealousy has ceased to present an issue: Ling sits outside with Xi Feng, partially scanning the surroundings on sentry duty and partially babbling to Xi Feng about stars and constellations and ancient emperors watching over their people from the silver-lined sky over head.

After the kindling built up over a fortnight has burnt away to warm ash and settled into coals glowing faintly in their yellowed light, Lan Fan and May rest upon the pillows, limbs entangled. With her braids loose and frizzling over her shoulders, her short bangs slicked to her forehead like four thick marks of their love framing her eyes, May is the Pulse reborn in Lan Fan’s arms. Cradled by the circle of hands linked at her hip, the princess of a Clan that no longer exists examines Lan Fan’s automail port with the expertise of an alkahetrist and the ignorance of a not-automail mechanic. With a forefinger that trails heat as though her finger were the paintbrush of the gods with the fires of the stars as her ink, she traces out an array on Lan Fan’s shoulder. The skin stretches and constricts. Forces the automail deeper into the muscle and bone of her stump to avoid the steel popping from the socket, an injury that would lose them the game, forever.

The pain doubles Lan Fan over.

May’s whispers, May’s touch, May’s chi is her light through the tidal waves of agony that course through the marrow of her bone to ice her spine and sear her nerves; vaguely she wonders if ripping her automail clear from her arm would somehow be less painful than the alternative of struggling to hold on to the flotsam of May’s existence through the monsoon clawing apart the inner silk of her mind.

If she gave in, if she set the emotionless primality lurking within her free—

No.

Ling. May.

Slowly, steadily, the pain subsides, and Lan Fan slumps forward, drawing her eyelids over the darkness of the world.

When she comes to May is forcing her jaw up into the inferno of May’s dark gaze. “Look at me,” the former princess screams. “Look at me, Lan Fan.”

Widening her eyes, Lan Fan stares into May’s pupils. Disks of sable. Softened by white. A midnight sky, as if the gods have plunged the world into a perpetual midnight.

May releases her; the right side of her lower jaw burns. Lan Fan rubs at the soreness. Opens her mouth to test. “Thank the Heavens,” May murmurs, hesitantly reaching a hand to stroke Lan Fan’s hair. She massages her right shoulder where the flesh ends and the automail begins. “Thank the Heavens. I don’t know how you haven’t succumb, but don’t. Please. I love you.”

“I love you too.” When Lan Fan swallows the aridity of her throat aches. Reading her expression, May passes her the wineskin; the water cools the inside of Lan Fan’s mouth, soothes the barren wasteland of her fear.

“How is she?”

Ling. Chi. As her vision focuses, she makes out his form, sitting cross-legged a bit aways from her, still rocking Xi Feng, who in turn holds Xiao Mei as though the panda were a soft toy. Xiao Mei would bite off someone’s head if she voiced the thought, and that nearly succeeds in cheering her. Ling offers her an encouraging grin. “You feelin’ okay?”

“The infection hasn’t spread at all.” May shakes her head. “The most I can do is keep the automail in her arm, as much as possible. As far as we know it spreads through open wounds, so if the wound isn’t open, it shouldn’t spread. Maybe it needs air.” She frowns. Ling and Lan Fan exchange an identical glance of immediate understanding. Their hands shift to the collars, to the hems of their shirts. “Strip.”

The three of them strip. Fold their clothing. Inspect one another: scratches, cuts, bruises that could signal injuries, scrapes, skins. Anything that dampens the flesh with scarlet. Anything that dampens the flesh with scarlet.

May checks Xiao Mei. Twice, thrice. Lan Fan winces while Ling handles her arm, circumscribes the base of her automail with the heel of his hand. At length Lan Fan gives the signal, the nod, the backwards step, because of the three of them they all know that she’ll be first to plunge a blade into a friend’s corpse’s neck. Not because she would betray her friends for herself. But because her undying loyalty to whomever remains would strangle the moral compass in the back of her mind, spinning north towards the pupil-shrinking vein-bursting eyes of the damned cadaver of her friend, her lover, her other half.

The inquisition complete and verified, the three crumple where they stand. Breathe in relief, breathe in the scent of one another’s happiness, breathe in another night and another sunrise lurking over the horizon.

A whuffling. Xiao Mei chirps; Xi Feng begins to wail. Lifts her tiny hands into the air and clenches her fingers around empty air. Someone—May? Ling?—gasps, sharp and painful as a blade through bone. Noiselessly the three move towards the child, swaddled in Ling’s yellow jacket. Lan Fan reaches her first.

At least in the flames May and Ling won’t be able to tell which bones are hers. Were hers.

They spend three nights at rest in the village before the deadening of the Pulse spurs them onwards. East and north. Ronshito. Snow. To the land of the rising sun, to the land of dawn, to the land of hope.

And then to the unforgiving cold. Because the fires of the sun have little effect but to drive the damned forward.

But Lan Fan awakens that avarice, that greed, that want. And all she wants is for her May and her Ling and perhaps herself to survive.

And so she will. And so they all will.

The cold never bothered her anyway.