#canon? what's canon? all canons have been slow-cooked in a crock pot and ripped apart for juicy bits

[words-writ-in-starlight]

1) Your post recommending that people watch the untamed actually convinced a friend of mine to watch it, so thanks! I need more people to scream with about this show with. 2) About song lan/xiao xingchen, I thought it's cool that song lan left with xxc's sword (purpose & focus of energy), spiritual power (literal soul), and eyes (literal body). What if someone could use that to resurrect him? Mostly bc i love the idea of them mirroring lwj/wwx's reunion somehow. So many possible parallels.

First of all, VICTORY, everyone should watch the Untamed and scream to me about it.  If anyone wants a rec post, here it is.

Second of all, G O D, I’m so???  I’m so proud of you for being the very first person to send me an ask about Xiao Xingchen/Song Lan, I love them so goddamn much, what a fucking tragedy.  The potential.  The girlfriend got very frustrated with my determination to wallow in the Anguish(TM) and dared me to write a coffee shop AU, so I am doing that.

Sort of.

There is a coffee shop extant in the AU, it exists, the fact that it is also a “Song Lan has wandered the earth for a thousand years waiting for Xiao Xingchen to reincarnate and now he has and he doesn’t know Song Lan” AU is secondary to the fact that THERE IS A COFFEE SHOP IN THIS FIC.

Anyway.  I’m kind of thinking about like...a Galatea kind of situation here?  As long as we’re on the subject of reincarnation AUs and happy endings.  Like, Song Lan sees to it that a memorial is built for Xiao Xingchen, and that’s one thing, but he also creates a statue, and that’s quite another.  It takes him a long time to think of it, and he does it because he wants to be sure that he can remember the shape of his jaw, the bend of his wrist.  Song Lan is the only fierce corpse in the world who’s spent untold decades refining the brute strength of the dead into something that resembles a skilled touch, so that he can use Shuanghua (and Fuxue, but...mostly for Shuanghua) as it deserves, and he puts it to work on clay and then on stone.

It takes him a long time.  That’s okay.  Song Lan has nothing but time.  A-Qing is gone, her spirit healed and free, and he encouraged her to move on, because it would hurt Xiao Xingchen, when he came back, to know that A-Qing lingered as a ghost for his sake.  All Song Lan has left to him is time and Xiao Xingchen’s sight and sword and soul, so he looks on the world and makes sure to find it beautiful, and goes night hunting for anyone who will take a strange mute cultivator’s help, and creates a statue so that the world will remember him.

He’s sorry, when the statue is finally finished.  It’s nowhere in particular.  It’s somewhere important.  Song Lan doesn’t know where the celestial mountain is, relative to anything in particular, but he has a--painfully clear memory, of opening his new eyes for the first time, and knows the Nowhere In Particular crossroad in question down to the blades of grass.  The statue raises its blindfolded face toward the sunrise, with a small smile on its lips and a hand held out as if in benediction or aid.  It’s tall and handsome, delicate-boned and long-haired, dressed in flowing robes and bearing a whisk in the crook of its folded arm.  It holds no sword--of course.  Song Lan couldn’t bring himself to give it a facsimile of Shuanghua, not while he holds out hope that the real thing might someday see its owner again.

Song Lan lets his fingers linger on the palm of the uplifted hand before he steels himself to step away.

The statue stirs, and reaches after him.