Chapter 16 - Confession

Feng Xi looked at Ao Wen's serious face before she moved to lock the door. The air in the workshop suddenly felt heavy as Ao Wen continued to work, refusing to meet Feng Xi's emerald eyes as she began to speak.

"I thought all morning about how to say this to you. It gets jumbled quickly no matter how I played things out in my mind. Xi," Ao Wen paused to draw a deep breath, finally looking up to gaze into Feng Xi's eyes. "I love you." Having started, she plunged ahead. "It's all tangled up in my heart. I promised, if I didn't awaken, I'd never tell you because it would only hurt you to… but I did awaken. And things happened. But I have to tell you now, before anything else muddles it up," Ao Wen finished quietly, seeing the confusion on Feng Xi's face… what was she supposed to say? Even now, she didn't know.

"Wen, I," Feng Xi started, disoriented by the unexpected confession. "How long… how long have you…?" She didn't know how to complete the sentence. Felt this way? Known? No matter how clearly she thought she could see the heart of another, she'd never dreamed that Ao Wen felt this way towards her.

"I don't know. I think since two years ago when you awakened," Ao Wen said softly. "First, you were my best friend, from the time we were young enough to climb on the statues in the courtyard, you were the friend that mattered most to me. Then, we grew up a little and it felt like we were as close as real sisters. We went everywhere together, got in trouble together, celebrated together. We were the best of sisters."

"What changed?" Feng Xi asked. She stood frozen by the door, wanting to move closer to her sister who was clearly struggling as she poured her heart out. At the same time, she didn't know how Ao Wen would react if she approached her. Would she think that she felt the same way? What did she feel? Feng Xi didn't know what she felt, so she stayed frozen by the door.

"You said people saw you differently when you Awakened. I did too. You were so much more, radiant I think. I thought I finally understood what Father meant when he talked about meeting Mother." Ao Wen paused, trying to find the words to describe the feeling. "When you walk into the room, I could feel the world get a little bit brighter. When you were hurt, I would do anything to make it better. When you were happy, I just wanted to share the happiness with you. Sometimes, when we're close, I want to reach out and kiss your lips, to hold you close and never let go…." Ao Wen trailed off, looking away again, her ears burning. "That's not the kind of love a woman has for her sister," she mumbled.

"Why tell me now?" Feng Xi asked, finally coming to stand on the other side of the workbench from Ao Wen. Feng Xi's heart wanted to race but she forced it to slow. She cultivated her heart to understand and affect the hearts of others with her music. She might not have her zither, but she knew that she could never understand her sister's pain and worries if she was too wrapped up in her own reaction. Taking a deep breath, she visualized a single sustained note she hung the turmoil of her own feelings on that note so she could focus on the many notes of discordant feelings her sister was emanating.

Reaching out, she placed a long slender finger on Ao Wen's chin and turned her face back to meet her gaze. "There's more here isn't there, little sister?" Feng Xi said felt. "You feel like something is forcing you. Is it really because you just Awakened or is there something else? Please, help me understand," she said, moving her hand to Ao Wen's shoulder and giving her a gentle reassuring squeeze.

"This is part of why I love you," Ao Wen said with a sad smile. "You see right into my heart, every time." Taking a deep breath, she summoned up all of her willpower to meet Feng Xi's emerald eyes. "I need you to know that I love you. That Ao Wen loves you," she said in a way that didn't sound like she was repeating herself. "I felt like this before I awakened. Awakening didn't change me, not this part of me. I promised myself that day when we were walking towards the Holy Light Abode, that if I Awakened, I could tell you what I felt. I told myself that it didn't matter if you could feel the same way or not. As long as you were still my sister, the rest didn't matter, but I couldn't bear it if knowing this about me made us strangers. I couldn't bear not telling you either."

The intense feelings hit Feng Xi like a loud beautifully played chord. It was hard not to get swept away by the force of those feelings. Still, Feng Xi held herself back, keeping her own feelings suspended as she truly listened to what Ao Wen had said. "You're evading again," Feng Xi said gently after a long pause. "Something that isn't your promise made this different. I know you Wen, and something about all of this doesn't feel like the Wen I know." This was all wrong, she thought. The place was wrong, the mood was wrong, the near desperation in Wen's voice. None of it was what it should be. To Feng Xi, while the notes felt individually strong, pure even, the way they were arranged made no sense. "You love stories," she said, like seeing a loose thread and pulling on it. "You like grand adventures, stories of great heroes, and greater loves. Confessing in your father's workshop isn't what I'd expect from you," she concluded. "The Wen I know would sweep me off my feet, not hide behind a table and refuse to meet my eyes. So what happened when you awakened?"

"I… I met someone," Ao Wen said at last, looking back at the planks in front of her and forcing her hands to move to distract herself from the sound of her heart pounding in her chest. Facing a trio of Wind Howl Coyotes was less terrifying than this! "I met myself. The self I was in a past life."

"Your past life?" Feng Xi said, shock rippling across her face. The chord she'd hung her own feelings on broke, unleashing the inner turmoil she'd been holding back and sending her heart racing. "Is that why you don't sound like Ao Wen?" Feng Xi asked, her emerald eyes becoming cold as faint white energy gathered at her fingertips. "If you've taken my sister from me, if you've hurt her…!" Feng Xi said fiercely, imagining some ancient Sorceress trying to take Ao Wen's body and life from her to live again or something even worse!

"See? You are my sister," Ao Wen said, putting down the saw she'd picked up to begin roughing out the shape she'd drawn. She struggled to meet Feng Xi's intense gaze, afraid that if she said the wrong thing, her sister wouldn't understand and things would turn violent. "I said the same thing when I met her," she said, looking directly into Feng Xi's eyes before continuing. "Evidently, it doesn't work that way though. She's dead, I'm me. When I die, I'll become someone else."

"The way you say that…" Feng Xi said, more frightened by the flat tone with which Ao Wen mentioned dying and becoming someone else than the idea that she'd been someone else before. Slowly, Feng Xi let go of the energy she'd gathered and pulled back on the maelstrom of emotions raging in her heart. Listen first. Understand first. As she watched Ao Wen struggle to find the strength to tell her story, Feng Xi realized that she needed to match that strength with her own strength to truly hear what Ao Wen was saying.

"I know." Ao Wen said. "I tried not to think about it too much but… I've had more than a little time to think about it. I can't tell you how many times I thought about this conversion. I usually stopped before we got this far though… I kept coming up with too many things that would hurt so much. So… here we are. Kind of a mess."

"Those nine days… were you talking to your… past self all that time?" Feng Xi asked. She thought about all the different expressions she'd seen from Ao Wen during that time. The expressions of pain. What had hurt her?

"Not exactly," Ao Wen said, picking the tools back up as a distraction while she spoke. "In my previous life, I was the Singing Lotus Immortal Empress Mei Lien. She's the one who explained things to me. She isn't my only past life," Ao Wen said, hands moving mechanically from one plank to the next, repeating what she'd done with the first plank and roughing out its shape. "Before me, there were many others. Seventeen others," she said, stressing the number.

"So you just keep cycling, again and again? Wait, SEVENTEEN?" Feng Xi said, recognizing the significance of the number.

"I still don't know what happened to the others during the Awakening Ceremony," Ao Wen said. "But it feels like a creepy coincidence doesn't it?"

"Too creepy to be a coincidence," Feng Xi nodded in agreement. "But wait, if this Mei Lien was an Immortal Empress, how did she die?"

"I don't know," Ao Wen answered, moving to a smaller saw to refine the shape emerging from the plank. "She wouldn't say, only that some people were worth dying for. People she loved the way I love you. She said some of those people are still alive and that I may find them one day."

"The way you love me? You mean that Mei Lien also loved other women?" Feng Xi's mind raced. Slowly, a unique song of Ao Wen's heart was emerging from the discordant notes, but would it be a happy song? A sad one?

"She did," Ao Wen answered directly. "According to her, I've loved women in all eighteen of my lives. She said I might break the trend, not that I can imagine a man I'd rather be with than being with you. But she said that I'm really different from any of those previous lives," Ao Wen continued. "They were all human. I'm the first Spirit Folk. Beyond that though, there are so many places where we're clearly different. You know, when I met her, she was playing the zither? Can you imagine these hands of mine plucking strings like you do?" Ao Wen asked rhetorically, gesturing to the calluses on her hands from holding tools. "There's more though. It's the part I'm scared of."

"Look at me," Feng Xi said, reaching out and taking Ao Wen's hand. Ao Wen had started rambling. There were still things to be said but whatever she was afraid of was backing up the words in her mouth, and she was tripping over herself to say something, anything, to fill the space till she could get the hard part out. "I don't know what to feel about all this yet but I know one thing. Whatever you're scared of, your big sister will face it with you," she said. For someone who cultivated their heart, intensely emotional moments like these were not that different from a pitched battle. They'd gotten to the part that really scared Wen, now they just needed to face it together.

"Thank you," Ao Wen said, gripping Feng Xi's hands tightly. "This is the hard part. I don't know much about my other lives, but I do know that when I die, I can pass down things from this life or my other lives into the next one. Some knowledge, skills, talents… I'm not sure what all goes with it but Mei Lien gave me six words. One of them is about what I'm carving out here."

"A sword?" Feng Xi guessed.

"Close enough. A saber," Ao Wen said, her hands resuming their work. "In my inner world, there are six rooms full of things that relate to the words. Mei Lien told me that before my Awakening finished, I should pick a saber technique. So I did, almost by accident. I was curious about how someone as short as I am could use such a long weapon and it was supposed to relate to Earth as well. I figured it would be good given my Earth Dragon bloodline. But when I picked up the scroll, I fell into another life. Not Mei Lien's life. Jun Biyu's."

"The Jun clan" Feng Xi said, the final missing notes starting to fill the gaps in the song. "So the people you mentioned, Jun Xiang, Jun Ben, and the rest were people you knew in that life?"

"Mmm," Ao Wen said with a nod. "They were martial brothers and sisters. We learned the saber in the desert from Teacher Xie. I was there for three months just to learn the first named technique of the Obsidian Night Scorpion Long Saber art," she paused. "At first, it was just day after day in the desert, learning. It was harsh at times, but ultimately good for us. Then we went hunting," she continued, her eyes becoming cloudy. "I was separated from the others and injured. I passed out on my way towards them. I don't know what happened to them after that moment," she said thickly. "That's when I woke up."

"And that's what you're afraid of?" Feng Xi asked, trying to understand. There were so many fears wrapped up in that. Fears grouped into a jagged ball that threatened the whole song that was trying to be heard.

"Yeah. The longer I was Jun Biyu, the harder it was to remember Ao Wen. Mei Lien warned me too, not to become an imitation of my past selves but to find my own way. Now, after being Jun Biyu for months, I feel… different," Ao Wen said as she tried to come up with ways to explain the thoughts that felt foreign. The things she'd never have thought or felt before. "I feel naked without a saber nearby," she said, gesturing at the wooden blade tracking shape in front of her. "I woke up before dawn that because I never wanted to suffer Teacher Xie's punishment for being late to training again. It's things like that. I have all these thoughts that I wouldn't have thought before but the scary part is that after the past three months, they don't feel wrong. I don't feel like I lost any of Ao Wen," she said. "It's like I'm a bucket. Right now, the bucket is mostly full of Ao Wen, with a splash of Jun Biyu poured on top. But what happens if it keeps going? If the bucket has the same amount of Ao Wen but more and more of other people. What happens then?"

"So the reason you confessed to me now is because you want me to know that the confession comes from the Ao Wen part of the bucket," Feng Xi said in understanding. "You don't want me to think that it's Mei Lien or Jun Biyu who fell in love with me, but Ao Wen, my dearest little sister," she said gently. The song of Ao Wen's heart lay bare before her, quivering and vulnerable, strong, intense but also very fragile. She understood. But now what?

"You see why it has to be now?" Ao Wen said, looking up with puffy red eyes. "Right now, I'm mostly me. I only got a little piece of Jun Biyu. But I'm scared to touch any more of what's in my own inner world. Scared that Ao Wen will get lost in all of it. Scared that I'll turn into someone who isn't your sister anymore," she finished faintly.

"Okay, first step," Feng Xi said, stepping around the workbench to wrap her arms around Ao Wen. She still hadn't sorted out the song of her own heart but she knew that right now, Ao Wen didn't actually need her to become a lover. She needed the love of someone who understood her and wouldn't abandon her as she faced the things she was afraid of. Whether their relationship would change in the future, she didn't know, but that she was the person Ao Wen needed right now? Of that, she had no doubts.

Ao Wen needed her big sister, age Feng Xi would never abandon this little sister of hers. "The first step is to stop referring to Ao Wen as though she's a separate person from you. If you learned a bit from Jun Biyu then you learned a bit," she said, trying to make it feel ordinary. Ao Wen needed ordinary right now. Learning from others was ordinary. "You're still you. I don't want to hear any more of this talking like you're a different person than my sister, okay? I don't know about any of the rest of it, but we can talk about it, bit by bit," she continued confidently. "Tell me everything. What are the other words you have? Why did you call Jun Ben an idiot? My little sister went on an adventure and I want to hear all about it," she finished, pulling up a stool to sit nearby and listen to Ao Wen's whole story. She let the emotions she'd been keeping on a chord free. She'd seen the problems from a distance, isolated from her own feelings, and it helped them both get this far. Now she wanted to really feel, right along with Ao Wen as she told her story.

Feng Xi didn't know how to feel about Ao Wen's confession but she did know her little sister was hurting and she trusted her big sister with all of that hurt. She didn't have to know how to feel right now, she just needed to help her sister stop hurting. Thinking about what Ao Wen said earlier, Feng Xi realized how much her thoughts echoed Ao Wen's words. Maybe… maybe their feelings weren't that far apart after all.