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Time feels insubstantial walking over Meng Po’s bridge. Vibrant rows of red spider lilies adorn the banks of the Wang Chuan River, swaying lightly in the breeze. There’s a slight reddish hue in the river. If he closes his eyes, it is almost as if the souls’ whispers made the breeze up. If he concentrated, he could hear them wailing, shouting, begging.
There is nothing to do but think there. Time is at a standstill to him. And so he does. Inevitably, his thoughts all left to the only person he’d hand his heart out to, the only person who could - and had - wreaked him. The only person he’d loved.
Kitay hadn’t ‘fallen’ in love with Rin. The word ‘fall’ implies an accident, a mistake. Kitay had chosen to love Rin, each vicious second, through every bloody torment, he’d chosen her. He’d chosen her through her worst, and he won’t abandon her in death. He could have crossed the bridge alone. But he’d gone along with it, so now he’d follow Rin beyond the end.
He’d wait until his soul is nothing more than a wisp, he’d wait until the memories of their life are nothing more than a blur, he’d wait even if she doesn’t come.
He doesn’t drink the soup of forgetfulness. He waits atop the bridge diligently, and he remembers. He considers what they had done.
And that’s worse than letting go. He does it for her.
They died at the same time, but the time they spent repenting for their ‘sins’ had been vastly different. He thinks back to the pain - it had never mattered the circumstances, only the choices they had made.
And so he makes another: he waits.
***
Time passes. He can barely feel it. He doubts he’d be able to count it in mortal months and years there. Others cross the bridge, but it’s as if he’s standing in a haze. He’s a statue frozen in time. It doesn’t occur to him that he could have missed Rin - he knows that she would never leave the bridge without him.
He breaks out of the trance once and leans over the edge. He checks himself in the crimson waters of the Wang Chuan River, the boundary between life and death, equally repulsive and enthralling. He thinks he barely recognises who’s standing there anymore. It’s as if his reflection misses things, misses people, misses Rin and Venka and Nezha, misses Kinata and his parents, and if Rin were standing there, she’d joke that it’s missing stacks of books about taxes too.
His lips curve upwards at the thought. His heart aches. She’s ruined him. He’s ruined her. They’ve ruined each other. They need each other.
What were they, if not the pain they brought upon each other?
(Once, they were something else, something pure, something between two Sinegard students, something between two people who didn’t fit in or had been abandoned. Now, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to tell them apart from a vicious entanglement of love and hate.)
***
He feels her arrive before he sees it.
Her messy short brown hair and blood-red eyes greet him from afar. He wonders if she’d ever wanted to grow her hair out. He wonders if she’d ever been given the choice. He wonders if she ever had agency over anything. It’s just hair, it shouldn’t be that big - but it’s almost a representation of the bigger aspects of her life she hadn’t controlled.
Her face is a contradicting expression - he sees longing and anger and love and regret and hatred. The nuance of her emotions makes her stop in her tracks.
There are no words left unsaid between them, because there haven’t been many that needed to be said in the first place. Their souls are tethered. They are bonded. They understand each other.
So instead of speaking, he offers her his embrace.
She runs into it and buries herself in his arms.
There’s a burden on their heads, there’s blood on their hands, their love is tainted and stained, but if he closes his eyes and wraps his arms tighter around her, breaths into her scent and doesn’t let her go, he can pretend they’re back at Sinegard, that Nezha and Venka are alive, somewhere. That it’s going to be okay. They’re going to be okay.
They stay like that for an eternity.
“Do you think we’ll find each other in the next life?” When she speaks, her voice is croaky. The words are spoken so softly, even though the bridge is deadly silent, he barely comprehends them.
He hears what she doesn’t say: Will we ever get a chance to make amends? Will we ever get better circumstances to love each other? Will we ever get to be happy?
“I don’t know,” he admits, answering the unspoken questions, looking down, “But I’ll find you. I’ll always find you.”
“Do you regret it?” she asks.
He asks in return, equally as softly, “What part of ‘it’?” even though he knows that if the ‘it’ concerns Rin, the answer would always be ‘no’. He’d curse himself for it, maybe, but he would never regret it.
“Finding me again,” she says, simply, slightly pulling back.
“No.” that had never been something he’d have to ponder about.
She bitterly laughs. “You should, Kitay.”
He entangles his hand with hers, delicately drawing him away from their embrace so that he’s able to look right into her eyes. “I shouldn’t. The war fucked us over, Rin. We were kids. I didn’t belong there, and neither did you.”
“You’ll never know peace as long as you stay with me.”
“I don’t want peace, I want to drown and burn and choke the world with you. I want calamitous love, and I want the insurmountable grief you bring me.”
She laughs. It’s heartbreaking and melancholic, and he laughs with her.
They will walk off the bridge together, and when they meet again in their next lives, they’ll have the chance to continue the dance they’ve started.