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It had been raining for days.
Not the summer kind, that played upon the leaves like careless fingers over a harpstring. No, this was the gray, drenching sorrow of the sky collapsing in on itself — and still doing it with restraint, as if the clouds themselves were too tired to weep properly. There was no green left here. No birds. No temple, no brethren, no sacred order. What remained of the world I once knew was beneath my boots, crushed under centuries of decay.
And yet—
A red flower. Small. Shivering. Stubborn.
It had grown in a crack between blackened stones where the earth should have given up. Its petals, thin and trembling like breath caught mid-confession, looked out of place — as he had once looked, standing at the threshold of the old Xiaolin temple, soaked in sun and smile and naïveté.
I extended the umbrella before I realized I had moved. The handle was cold in my palm — I don't know how long I'd been carrying it. The rain bent around it now, falling just shy of the blossom. I did not crouch to touch it. Reverence cannot always be physical. Sometimes it is enough to guard the memory.
It reminded me of him.
Not the him the world would know in centuries to come — the reckless boy with wild red goggles, loud dreams and louder failures. That Jack, brimming with machinery and pretense, was a shadow cast by the one I knew.
The one I lost.
He used to wear a pale tunic, loose and fluttering like it was unsure whether it was clothing or wind. The soft yellow of it looked like filtered sunlight, and he wore a wide-brimmed straw hat when the sun became overbearing. He’d tilt it up with two fingers and smile like it was a secret we shared — that it was too bright for us, for people who preferred corners and questions and the kind of joy that was not loud, but soft and sure.
That smile — that soft smile — did not belong to a warrior. It was unbecoming of a monk. And still… still I had memorized it. Like scripture. Like betrayal.
I suppose I always knew it was not permitted. Not in that way.
And yet, memory is not bound by the rules of the temple. Nor by the rules of gods. What we feel in silence survives all ruin.
He used to speak with too much feeling in his hands. Sometimes he’d stop talking mid-thought, just to look at a bird, or the way a shadow curved along a hallway. I think he loved the world too much to be safe in it. And still he remained — unscathed, uncorrupted. Until I—
No. The past is not a blade I need to sharpen again.
And yet I remember it clearly: the first time he sat beside me under the eaves after training, when my hands were still bruised and my path still straight. He brought me dried fruit in his sleeve and offered it with an awkward laugh. "You look like someone who forgets to eat when you're busy brooding," he said, with that damnable smile that made me forget I was meant to be serious.
I took it. Of course I did. And when our fingers brushed, I did not move away.
Does that make me weak? I wonder, sometimes, as the rain falls and all is ash and shadow around me. Was I weaker then, in hesitating to reach for him? Or am I weaker now, for remembering him still — for sheltering a flower in a dead land, simply because its color reminded me of a boy who wore yellow and smiled too gently?
I have lived for centuries now, in palaces of silence and stone, among beasts who need no names. I have grown powerful, unchallenged, feared. But nothing — nothing — has endured within me like the soft brush of his voice saying, “Chase… you look tired today. I hope the stars leave you alone tonight.”
Even now I remember the way he would sit, legs crossed too neatly, picking at threads from his sleeves, watching the firelight as if it told stories only he could hear. And I remember how I used to pretend not to watch him — how I failed every time.
The flower bends in the rain, the red deepening as the water darkens the soil. The umbrella stays in place. I make no move to leave. Some ghosts do not haunt. They wait. Quietly. Like me.
I still remember how he used to tease me — gently, without cruelty. Mischievous in a way only the truly gentle can be. He once told me I was too tense, that my posture was an affront to every breeze trying to pass through me. And then, without asking, he hugged me. Just like that. His arms wrapping around my shoulders, his face buried against the space where armor would someday be. I did not hug back. I didn’t know how.
He didn’t mind.
He called it a “Chase kind of hug.” I think he was trying not to let me feel ashamed of being afraid of softness.
There were nights when he held my hand without a word, our backs pressed to the cool stone walls just outside the monks’ quarters. I never asked why he did it — I told myself he needed comfort. But perhaps… he knew I did. His fingers were always warm, calloused slightly from training, and he’d move them as though drawing shapes across my skin.
He would wait until the night turned to that deep, impossible blue — the hour when the stars felt too far and too quiet — and ask:
“Will you be there when I wake up?”
It was not a question I knew how to answer. Because I didn’t know.
I knew what duty required. I knew what the scrolls said. What the elders expected. What the future demanded of us.
But I didn’t know if I’d be allowed to stay beside him.
And now, centuries later, I know I did not.
He would ask things I couldn’t answer — about what came after, about what we’d become, about if one day the world would forget us entirely. He had this way of laughing through fear, of smiling as though he could swallow doubt if he wrapped enough warmth around it.
And I—
I just sat there. Always silent. Always the coward dressed in the robes of a prodigy.
How I wish…
I had just held your hand and told you I loved you.
Not with riddles. Not with quiet nods. Not by offering my bowl of rice when I thought you were hungry. But with words.
With the thing you wanted most from me, and the only thing I could not give when it would have mattered.
Love.
Such a small word. Such a devastating one.
You would have smiled — not surprised, not wide-eyed. Just… softened, maybe, as you always did when something fragile entered the room. And I think, in that life, in that world now buried under ash and time, you might’ve reached for my hand again, and said:
“It’s okay. I already knew.”
But I didn’t say it. I never did.
And so I stand now, in a graveyard of the world, keeping an umbrella over a stubborn flower, as if to pretend this act of mercy could ever reach across lifetimes. As if to pretend I am not still trying — after all this time — to protect something that felt like you.
You’re gone.
You’ve been gone for a very long time.
But the rain still falls. And this red bloom… still stands.
Perhaps, in some way, that means you do too.
Because you did — for longer than the world deserved.
You lived. Even when it wasn't kind. Even when it turned teeth on you for merely shining too softly. You had a way of attracting danger without even knowing it, like light drawing moths or fire drawing stories. You spoke with ease, but you felt everything too deeply — and in the end, I think the world punished you for it.
But even then, you never changed how you saw me.
Every night, when your voice dropped just above a whisper and your words stretched slow and hesitant like someone testing the depth of water, you’d tell me how you saw me. Not the way the temple described me. Not the way I tried to sculpt myself. But me, as you claimed to know me.
You remembered me as someone worth your respect.
I never understood why.
You said I carried something in my eyes that reminded you of the moon in its last quarter — sharp and fading, but still refusing to be gone. You never said I was kind. But you always said I was good.
I was never brave enough to tell you that I wasn’t sure you were right.
Once, I remember, you asked — quietly, like it wasn’t really a question — “Would you still like me if I got old? If I started to change and wrinkle and forget some things?”
I didn’t let you finish. I said it didn’t matter.
You smiled at me, and that was the first time I wanted to rewind time — not to say something different, but to say more. To speak completely.
But all I did was reach for your hand again and press forward, a little closer, as if the body could say what the mouth could not.
You used to tease me about how I would look old. You’d squint at me and wrinkle your nose and say, “I can’t imagine you with white hair. I bet you’d be grumpy. Or dignified. Maybe both.”
And sometimes you’d ask, more sincerely, what I wanted to be like when I was old.
But I never did grow old.
Not really.
And maybe — maybe you suspected.
Maybe you knew, in that instinctive way you had, that either I had been promised to something darker… or that something in me had always planned to step out of time.
You didn’t accuse me of it. You just kept smiling.
Still — it’s not unfair. That’s the word I used to reach for.
But now I know. It’s not about fairness.
It’s just that I never got to see you grow more.
Not the way you would have.
I never saw your hair lose its brightness, or the lines that might have gathered at the corners of your eyes from too much smiling. I never heard how your voice would settle with age, or if you’d still laugh the same way — sharp at first, then softer, like a wave pulling back.
I don’t know what your quiet would have sounded like when you learned how to rest.
Because you never had the chance.
And I… I never earned the right to see it.
Now, I walk through centuries. Faces blur. Names fade. Empires fold into dust.
But your voice still lives where memory keeps its oldest flame.
And in places like this — dead places, forgotten by time, where the only color is a stubborn little bloom — I remember.
And I wait.
As the flower loses its battle — its stem bowing under the weight of rain and time — I hold it. Gently. As one might cradle the final breath of a song.
As I once held him.
I bring it closer, inch by inch, not because I believe it can feel, but because some gestures refuse to belong to logic. My fingers tremble — not from age, for I do not age — but from something far more persistent. Far older.
My lips hover just above the damp, fading red. So close.
Just as I once came close to his — breath mingling, heartbeat drumming like distant thunder in my throat.
But I did nothing.
Now, I do.
I kiss the petal.
Lightly. Softly. As if to erase centuries of silence in one impossible motion.
The rain presses down harder, perhaps offended by my audacity. Or perhaps it mourns with me.
Such a pity...
To have been a coward while you were alive.
And to be brave only now, now that you are ash and echo.
Maybe your absence made me this way.
Maybe I had to lose you to learn how to speak.
But what use is voice, now? What use is bravery, when it cannot reach you?
I close my eyes. The flower is nearly crushed in my hand, and still I hold it as if it could vanish with any wrong move. Just like you. Just like all the things I never said.
If I could go back — not to change fate, not to undo the fire that took you from me — but just to sit with you again. To hear the way you spoke nonsense before sleep. To watch you tilt your head at the stars like they were old friends.
I would still fail to say it.
But I would hold you longer.
I would stay, and stay, and stay.