writer, wanderer, etc.

"I didn't want this. I didn’t want to make room for you, I barred every door I owned—and my chest went on expanding and contracting anyway, and there you lived. Like a cancer, like the purest thing a blackened heart like mine was ever able to hold. I learned to love you when we were boys, I kept loving you when we were men, and I carried on loving you for every century since—against my will, against my strength, against my better judgment. I—I wasn’t born loving you, Feng Xin, but I will die doing it. It’s part of me now, as much as the skin my mother stitched, and I intend to leave this world ensconced in it, greedy thing that I am, always hungry for the most beautiful things that were denied to me from the cradle." He looks down at his own hands, then. His mother's hands, grown old-young around a saber. The hands that have opened more of Feng Xin's skin than any enemy he’s ever faced. The torrent is burning down; what is underneath it is gentler, and so much worse. He gives him that, too. "In another life, I do it differently. All of it. In another life, I hold your hand instead of my grudge. I lick your wounds clean instead of inflicting them—I would have been good at it, too; I was taught to mend long before I was taught to kill." The breath shakes over a splintered smile. "But there’s no other life for us. We traded our soul away when we chose divinity. One life, eternal, and I spent mine making you bleed."