veliseraptor
me watching the terrible breakup scene in episode 39, gently putting my hand over xue yang’s mouth: shhhh baby yes shhhh I know you’re very upset and feeling rejected right now but let’s calm down a minute and not say things we won’t be able to take back later
it’s like the inverse of “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” with these two. Anything I Can Do You Can Do Better
such a kind and considerate young man. truly an upstanding youth. definitely deserves to get everything he wants up to and including an impossible resurrection
“Ah, how this night is long”
I hope this post finally works, after a good dozen of the failed attempts to post it. Anyways!
The intersection of their stories turning into a meat grinder instead of a new spring hurts. Xue Yang, with his relaxed attitude towards physical death and pain eventually torn apart by a very different type of death and a very different type of pain, the types I doubt he ever gave a thought to before. Xiao Xingchen, whose life is ripped to pieces when, after the years of casual terrors, Xue Yang fails to adapt to a different existence, mercilessly dragging his familiar horrors, pain and bloodshed into the Xiao Xingchen’s honorable world and ripping the stitches of this fragile, new, barely germinating shared path of Xiao Xingchen and A-Qing from the inside before it ever has a real, true chance to bloom and grow, all of it so achingly close to the moment when he almost gets it right. And then all of it shatters, the sweet new life dies with Xingchen, and Xue Yang basically buries himself with him, doubles down, puts on his identity as a morbid form of revival. The revival of someone, who was the only person to give him a chance, albeit a fake one under the assumption of him being someone else, but nonetheless a chance to have it good, a chance abruptly ended by his own failure to step away from the only bloodied road he knew.
silvysartfulness
Chapter XXXVIII - One Can Be My Teacher of Heaven Has A Road But No One Walks It is up! :D
He had studied with many teachers throughout his life, knowing when to set pride aside to accept instruction from those more experienced than himself. Taught how to move his blade, perform the rituals of spiritual cleansing, seeking and understanding scholarly wisdom at first. Then the humbler everyday things it turned out you needed to know as a wandering cultivator on never ending roads – making shelter, telling the edible plants from the poisonous, cobbling together a broken shoe enough to keep walking to the nearest town to get new ones...
Enlightened masters and talented friends, young and old, gentry and vagrants - they had all been among his past teachers, and Song Lan had approached all his lessons with the same focused, solemn determination.
This should be no different.
Shouldn't.
Setting out to master any new craft was always a challenge, after all – intimidating, toilsome, even painful at times. You had to blister before you calloused, no skill grew out of nothing, mastery only won through tenacious dedication. He knew that. Wasn't afraid of the challenge, the work needed.
No, not of that.
I can learn, he had assured Xingchen, desperate to cleanse that look of forlorn horror off his face, and he had meant it. Could, would learn to do anything and everything that Xingchen needed - become what he needed.
He could learn.
Shivering, closing his eyes for a brief moment, Song Lan drew a slow quiet breath, cast one final look at his restlessly sleeping companion, and went to see Xue Yang.
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Happy New Year, wonderful people! Let's end/begin the year with a bang, as it were!
Working on this story, and the incredible encouragement and support you've given me along the way is the one thing that's kept me afloat during these clusterfucks of pandemic years. I'm so grateful to you all!
It's my hope that reading about these losers' miseries may have helped alleviate yours a bit too. 💚
May 2022 be a better one - for all of us.
