No Light: 3 Lives, 3 Worlds , Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms AU

Part 18: Silence

Darkness all around.

He could see nothing, could feel nothing. No sensations beat against his senses. Nothing but silence. And it was the absence that brought him closer to consciousness, rising wakefulness as he hadn't in millennia. He wasn't used to being blind to every part of himself. Moments crawled by, an endless monotonous series of beats that stretched out endlessly before him. His mind wondered idly why the only thing he felt was the passage of time.

And then something changed. A low-lying energy made itself known with a rapid build-up. It pushed against him, pushed away from him. It felt different yet familiar. Cold yet warm. Hints of a stranger that was already a part of him. There was an explosion. A fierce rush of air, a feeling of flying and soaring, of crashing and burning.

Pain became a constant, causing the beats to bleed into each other, to quicken, to falter, to slow once more before picking back up until they were racing along, carrying him with them. There was pressure, as if the weight of the entire world was pressing onto him, into him. A sharp sensation pierced his chest, shooting pain coursed through him insistently, until he parted his lips . . . why did he find it so strange that he had lips? . . .and breathed.

That first breath was followed by another, a loud thundering beginning in his ears. It took him minutes, maybe hours, to realize that it was the sound of his heart.

He pushed and pushed, until he forced his eyes open. His lashes flickered up, his eyes looking across the room, struggling to focus. It was harder than it should have been. His eyes were working, the whiteness before him was mist. Rocks. The coolness of the air pressing against his sensitized skin.

He struggled, pressing back against the weight that sat heavily on him, and moved his body. It was excruciating. The pain caused a gasp to escape from between his lips. He sat up, closing his eyes once more as the world spun around him. He found that darkness had its own soothing quality. There was silence once more, but a different kind of silence. This was not the nothingness of before, but a choice desperately made, his newly awakened senses crying out for a reprieve.

The whisper of footsteps advancing towards where he sat pulled him out of himself and forced him to pay attention to the world.

The footsteps faltered. Stopped. A sharp exhale cut through the silence, shattering it. The softness of that breath did not prevent him from recognizing who stood before him.

He turned his head, expecting to see her. Seventeenth stood in front of him. Memories flooded his mind. Of Kunlun Mountain. Of his disciples. Of meeting her. Of losing himself.

"Seventeenth," he finally murmured hoarsely, holding out a hand. "Come and let me take a look at you." He tugged her close and hugged her, unable to stop himself. She was solid, an anchor that held him to this plane when his spirit was loudly protesting its imprisonment in flesh once more.

He whispered words of comfort, broken and struggling. Anything to stop the tears that were streaming down her face. Anything to combat the tears that were welling up in his own eyes.

Sitting back, he gazed at her once more. And for the first time since his awakening, he felt something more than loss, something other than pain. His lips curved into a smile. Seventeenth looked lovely in this form, as well.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Later. How much later, he wasn't sure, time yet to regain meaning for him. He just knew that it was later that he sat in Seventeenth's Fox Den, surrounded by the people closest to him. She sat nearest to him, her eyes trained on his face. Zhe Yan sat a bit farther away, Bai Zhen a silent, yet supportive, shadow by his side.