Fluffy WangXian Oneshots Book Two

The Voice of the Soul Part 1

Moving across the country is hard. It's worse for Lan Zhan because he feels as though the pieces of his broken heart are left behind there, in the house where he and his brother lived with his mother.

The only thing of hers he's been allowed to bring is her precious guqin, and it rests across his lap now, sitting alone in the back seat of their Uncle Qiren's pale blue Mercedes car. His fingers rested upon the cloth cover his mother had hand stitched for it, joining two old cushion covers to make something truly ugly.

Lan Zhan's mother never wasted anything. Whether that was because they didn't have much to begin with, or because she was naturally thrifty, Lan Zhan didn't know. But he remembers his reaction to the rainbow colours on the material, his face showing how he felt even if he could not willingly form the words to tell his mother how truly awful it was.

Two mismatched patterns that clashed together like an apocalypse, swirls of purples and blues and pinks battling it out for dominance with a red and green paisley design that was probably rejected by Satan.

He isn't even sure why he hated it so much, but his mother had laughed at his face.

"A-Zhan, Sweetheart, there's beauty to be found in the ugliest of things. You just have to look for it," she had told him.

He never knew that these past few years spent together would be their last forever. That he would come home after running errands for his mother only to find her passed out on the kitchen floor, dead.

He doesn't remember calling an ambulance, or his brother, or anything much after that.

Then the almost painful embrace of Lan XiChen, his brother who came first to the hospital, where Lan Zhan was waiting for him. Until now, and they're on the way to a new place. The weeks in between, a painful blur of getting ready to move and tying up loose ends.

From the rural outskirts of Beijing to Shanghai.

Lan Zhan looks out of the window and past the changing scenery and doesn't see a single thing. His mind is trapped in the past with his mother and their idyllic life spent together.

Cooking with his mother, baking a cake for their separate birthdays, licking the spatula afterwards and feeling naughty about it. The way she used to squish his cheeks even as he grew taller than her, delighting in the micro expressions on his face as she teased him into a reluctant cheerfulness.

Ever since he could remember, his mother loved gardening the most. She would sink her fingers deeply into the soil and close her eyes, breathing in and filling her lungs full of the outdoors.

"Can you feel it, A-Zhan?" she would whisper, and it felt like there were only the two of them in that little back garden, in the whole world.

She would grab his hands and plunge them deeply into the soft soil, anxiously searching his face for that same wonder, that same disbelief she always had that whatever they planted here would miraculously grow.

Lan Zhan loved those hot summer days when they spent most of the daylight hours outside, planting, pruning and tidying up their green space, and then his mother would treat them to a glass of fresh lemonade sweetened with cane sugar juice and tons of ice cubes. They'd sit on the grass under the dying rays of the sunlight and waiting for the stars to come out.

Mother? Where are you? Lan Zhan wonders this in his mind, even as the car rolls to a stop.

"We're here," XiChen tells him, getting out of the car and opening Lan Zhan's door for him.

Lan Zhan doesn't want to get out of the vehicle suddenly. It represents safety to him, the in-between place of his comforting old life and starting this new one, full of strangeness and hardship. Once he sets foot outside its perimeters, there will be no going back for him.