Slowly, Zhou Liuxian's eyes fluttered open. He was… still in the old fishing hut? No, calling it old when it was in this state would just be an insult. This was the fishing hut, the one he lived in with Hai Xing for the first 20-something years of his life.
'Xing-ge.' Zhou Liuxian scrambled upright, almost falling off his bed in the process. Strange. He felt lighter than he should be. The sheets felt less raggedy than they did a minute ago. Cleaner, too.
Zhou Liuxian looked down. There was blood on his hands, yes, but it was dried and flaking and not pouring from his neck. Instead, it was glued to his left arm.
Oh. He was Lei Wutong again.
Specifically, he was fifteen-year-old Lei Wutong, the Lei Wutong who was terrible at hiding his stab wounds regardless of the fact that Hai Xing never said a word about them.
Lei Wutong dragged his pillow away from the head of the mattress. Sure enough, there was his black sword, rouge tinting the tip and staining the sheets beneath with browned blood.
He was.. free. For now, at the very least. Who knew when he was going to wake up again.
Lei Wu snatched up a piece of black cloth from his bedside, hastily coiling it around his injured arm. He jumped off the bed, and he rushed out of his room, out of the hut, and to the sea.
The sea was there! The sea was there and it was big and blue and had so much water that Lei Wutong almost forgot to breathe.
'I.. forgot the sea.' Lei Wu almost couldn't believe it now, staring at the endless expanse of blue crowding his vision and hearing the roar of the waves crashing into his ears, but he had. He'd forgotten that water could be anything other than muddy and brown and unpleasant.
Lei Wutong sat at the water's edge, refusing a glance down at the reflective blue slowly being stained by his own ichor. He did not want to see his own face.
He dried his hands on his black robes, the skin already feeling dry from the salt in the water he used to clean them.
He sat there for a moment, staring out at the horizon, and he thought about every little mistake he'd ever made, everything he had to do and undo and people to fix and break and…
But that wasn't for another two years. He had more important matters to attend to.
Lei Wu stood abruptly and ran as fast as he could on sand. He ran and he ran up the pier and he ran to the fishing hut and he ran to Hai Xing's room and he scrambled onto the mattress and he gently shook the black-haired person under the covers over and over and over and did not stop till the moment he got a response.
"Xing-ge… Xing-ge, wake up," he insisted. For a scarce moment Lei Wutong was scared that he would not move and the illusion would fall apart and shatter like the mirrors Lei Wu had smashed whenever he came across one.
But he did, and he was blessed with the luxury of seeing those gentle eyes dyed the hue of dried seaweed once again.
Hai Xing blinked blearily, the sleep clearing from his face within a sparse few seconds of waking. His silky black hair (how it was like this when they were so close to saltwater that dries everything out, Lei Wutong would never understand—perhaps the heavens favored his Xing-ge in certain ways) was spilled out on the sheets, a tipped over bottle of ink on parchment paper. He sat upright, one hand rubbing his right eye, the left eye peering down at Lei Wutong in mild confusion.
"…A-Wu? It's late. What's—"
Lei Wutong tied his arms tight around him.
"Xing-ge, I had a terrible dream." He felt Hai Xing's robes begin to dampen in the front from the saline dripping from his face. Hai Xing pretended not to, apparently.
A hand, warm and steady, rose to the top of Lei Wu's head. Down, back, up, down, back, up. A rhythm that was so painfully easy to by lulled by from the familiarity of it all. Hai Xing would always comfort him like this, back then.
"Mn.. Your hair's all matted, A-Wu," The older of the two chided, his fingers becoming caged in hair wherever they tried to comb through. "It needs to be washed."
Lei Wutong nodded numbly, forgetting that Hai Xing was a man of action rather than words and would drag him places if he did not go immediately when things needed to be done.
'I'd.. forgotten a lot.' That was a bit of a scary thought. Lei Wu tried not to think it again, and failed.
As Hai Xing was tugging him around (Lei Wutong usually let him do whatever, he had nothing to do most days back then anyway), he tried to think about what he did remember from eighty years ago.
A lot of the things Hai Xing did for him seemed brotherly in a way, and yes, he called him "Xing-ge"[1], but Lei Wu felt it wrong for their relationship to be described as "familial".
There was nothing "familial" about the way his heart pumped when Hai Xing held his hand as he took him from place to place (currently, it was doing cartwheels in his chest, it kind of hurt a bit) or when Hai Xing caught him staring at him and laughed and Lei Wutong's face turned into a plum blossom[2] and—
Lei Wu was snapped out of his daydreaming/reminiscing when warm water was dumped on his head, followed by a full-hearted laugh. He couldn't blame Hai Xing, he probably looked like a wet cat.
Speaking of, something that fascinated him about Hai Xing: his cultivation was beyond even that of heroic tales. No other human he met could hold a candle to Hai Xing, let alone hope to impress Zhou Liuxian. He could even separate salt molecules from water molecules to make freshwater and table salt!
All that power, and yet, he still chooses to be naught but a fisherman.
Truly, fascinating.
As his hair filled with suds, Lei Wu could faintly hear a soft hum beyond the buzzing of his skull from all this information and all these new-old senses.
Familiar, too, was that tune. Dimly, he recognized the sound as the melody his caretaker would hum daily. Whatever he was doing, there was that hum.
Lei Wutong had asked him about it countless times, but he never got a straight answer.
Lei Wu looked down. There, in front of him, was a water basin[3]. The water inside was clear as glass, offering almost a mirror to those who happened to gaze upon it.
Zhou Liuxian froze.
There, in the small mirror world made of water, was a face he never wanted to see again staring right back at him.
[1] — "ge" meaning "older brother" but can be used for older male friends by someone younger or of lower status
[2] — plum blossoms are normally red, similar to saying one's face is a tomato (basically, I made something up and my dear readers must go with it!)
[3] — image for reference in the comment below