Chapter Text
Wei Ying is NOT sorry and he IS going to try that again (if he survives) but right now the surviving part is important and so he is absolutely booking it towards the end of the corridor, where there is a window he can yeet himself out of, with sunlight or something equivalent shining through. He leaps for it, fingers scrabbling at the sill -
and faceplants into stone air.
Patting it frantically, he realizes it's crystal, very clear and flat, and at least it didn't shatter and cut him but -
he can't figure out the latch fast enough. There's -
a door! A door that's open, with daylight and dirt beyond it. He dashes through it.
This was a magnificent place once. A temple complex? A small castle? There’s still some red lacquer clinging to the pillars, a bit of gold leaf in the crannies of roof decorations. The paper windows have slumped and torn from damp, though, and trees as wide as a grown man split the paving stones. High on the layered eaves, crows call. When Wei Ying looks down again, there’s a boy kneeling in one of the doorless doorways, watching him.
Wei Ying shakes his head to dislodge the sensation of flickering, of something insubstantial licking his ear but from inside his skull, something off. There's one boy - there's two boys - there's a boy and a crow -
Wei Ying turns his gaze away, and squints through the corner of his eye, sort of shrugging his core.
The illusion resolves. Two boys, with crow-black hair and eyes.
"Hi!" Wei Ying says, excitedly, "Is this your place? Are you crow spirits?! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to trespass, I really will get out of your way as soon as I figure out what my way is, only, hey, do you maybe have something to eat I could trade for?"
“It’s no one’s place anymore,” the older boy says portentously.
The younger spoils the effect immediately by bouncing to his feet and darting a few steps closer, black eyes alight with curiosity. “You saw me! Nii-chan, he broke your genjutsu! Are you a shinobi too? I never saw you at the academy!”
They’re both very obviously rich kids dressed as peasants. It might fool other rich people. To Wei Ying’s street-tuned sense, they’re not at all convincing. A single layer of cotton robe not long enough to cover the trousers, sure, but unpatched, clean, and deeply dyed. Sandals instead of boots, but their feet are white. No guan, but their too-short hair shines.
The younger boy is his age! Just a little younger, which is perfect, he'll listen to Wei Ying even if he's rich!
Wei Ying bounces closer, holding out his hands to catch the other boy's. "Hi! I saw you! It's 'cause I'm a cultivator, and I'm gonna fight bad spirits, not good spirits, and monsters, so other people can do important stuff like farm! And weave! And not get eaten by monsters!"
(He looks around surreptitiously for this 'genjutsu' he's broken, but everything except the boys and crows looks pretty broken already, and it definitely wasn't his fault. And this place isn't theirs anyway, they said!)
"Want to go exploring with me?!"
The boy opens his mouth to agree, but hesitates, smile fading. “You’re hurt. Injures should be tended at the first opportunity, before further action can exaggerate… exasperate…”
“Exacerbate,” the bigger boy says, suddenly right there and patting the little one’s head. “Good, Sasuke.” He looks Wei Ying over critically. “Come inside, we have a camp.”
The younger boy takes Wei Ying’s less injured hand to tug him along. “I’m Sasuke. That’s my big brother Itachi. We’re on a training trip! Except we slept in the old clan compound and when we woke up the woods were gone and instead there’s… that now, and — not that I’m scared! It’s okay if you are though.”
Wei Ying recognizes the tactic of "when scared, comfort someone scareder," and decide he'll allow it.
"It is pretty spooky," he agrees, looking around, "I like this place, though. There's daylight. That's important. And crows! They wouldn't be here if there were monsters around, unless it was a monster crow maybe, but if there was a monster crow, oh, maybe we could bribe it with the giant crystal I found! Back through that door, unless it's shifted already. How long ago did you wake up with the woods gone? I went to sleep in the old emergency stores loading shed and when I woke up and tried to see if there were maybe some emergency stores left, there was miles of other houses instead of the granary, like, the inside bits, just rooms on rooms, and some of them are so weird, and there's other kids, too! And some of them are weird! Oh! I'm Wei Ying!"
The older boy, Itachi, says gently, “Something very strange is going on, but we’re well supplied, and this is our clan’s former home. It could be much worse.”
“There could be crocodiles,” Sasuke agrees. (Sasuke is NOT afraid of crocodiles! it’s his dinosaur that worries.)
“If crocodiles appear I promise to protect you,” Itachi says solemnly.
Sasuke says, “Do you like dango? We were bored and we had rice flour, so… we didn’t have any flavors except matcha though so I hope you like tea!”
Once Wei Ying’s eyes adjust, he can see that the crow boys have tidied up the big house’s kitchen and set up their camp there, with bedrolls laid out beside the low stone oven, and an enormous wok full of clean water simmering on top.
"I like tea," Wei Ying says hopefully, "I like food! Any food." He's still holding Sasuke's hand. He swings it between them, and promises, "I'll protect you, too."
“That means we’re a team, then. Right, nii-chan?”
“I suppose it does,” Itachi smiles. “Would you rather be the cook or the medic?”
“Medic!”
So Itachi sets to making little green dumplings out of sticky dough, and Sasuke gets a bowl of boiled water and a clean cloth.
“Wash, then disinfect, then bandages —“
“Hm?”
“Burn cream, then bandage.”
“Correct.”
Sasuke glows with his brother’s praise as he begins practicing field medicine on his new bestie.
"You have medicine." Wei Ying is super duper impressed. "And you're just gonna use it on me?" But if they're a team now, then it makes sense. And oh, he wants to be on their team. He'll make it up to them! He'll be useful! "If you guys just got here, then, then I could show you around," he offers, "There's safer places and less-safe places in the House. I don't know the other kids very well yet, but they've marked out territories and I can recognize some of them. I know what trade goods are most valuable. Medicine and food are pretty high on the list, you know." He winces at the disinfectant that Sasuke is swabbing his scrapes with, but he doesn't pull away. Sasuke is applying all the precious medicine liberally, already five little white puffs damp and discarded from cleaning his hands and knees and a seemingly endless supply of more. "You're really good at that. Are you two studying to be doctors?"
Sasuke shakes his head. “We’re shinobi!” It takes a bit of back and forth to get past their vocabulary and assumptions, but by the time Wei Ying’s hurts are well treated (and maybe a little too bandaged) he thinks he understands that ‘shinobi’ are like cultivators but instead of monsters and ghosts, they fight other people. Bandits and whatnot.
The boys are from an ancient shinobi clan that used to live in this complex, before it moved to a city, and Itachi has taken his little brother out to train him in woodcraft.
“Like making camps and fires and, and fishing, and tracking, and, and, and field medicine is important right? Because what if you’re way out in the woods chasing a murderer and you get a cut and it gets infected, and you get a fever, and you get lost cuz you’re all spinny? Then the murderer would catch you instead!”
“Wipe your hands, otouto.” Itachi sets down a heaping bowl of green dumplings drizzled with brown sugar syrup and dusted with nutty toasted soybean flour. “Careful, they’re hot.”
"Those smell delicious," Wei Ying tells him, and waits for Sasuke to take one and blow on it and put it in his mouth and make faces because it's too hot but he doesn't want to be rude and pant in front of a guest. He waits for Itachi to take one, too, but Itachi is waiting too, so still and calm, with the faintest smile as he watches his little brother.
Cautiously, watching to make sure it's okay, Wei Ying reaches out and takes the smallest one near him.
Itachi smiles a little deeper, so he smiles back and lifts it up to blow on it.
Only when he shapes his mouth to blow, drool leaks out, and his stomach suddenly snarls so loud Wei Ying jumps, and glances around the shadows for a dog. He slowly unfreezes, face flooding red, and jams the dumpling in his mouth. Sasuke claps his hand over his mouth so he doesn’t spray crumbs when he laughs.
“Eat slowly if it’s been a while,” Itachi cautions. “Don’t worry, there’s plenty.”
Wei Ying nods, eyes closed and tears leaking out. The dumpling is very hot, and gloriously sweet and rich and nutty. It scalds his mouth. He wants to eat his bodyweight in them. He wants to savor this one dumpling forever.
" 'nk oo," he tells Itachi, sincerity from the depths of his trembling soul. He mentally upgrades 'crow spirit' to 'benevolent crow deity.'
There's a particular feeling when the doors switch around. Some kids claim there's a tension, or a scent of ozone and mildew, just before. Others feel their ears pop after the doors swap. Wei Ying thinks the rooms change how they sound, when they rearrange themselves. He's starting to be able to tell when it's happened, because a different room on the other side of the door echoes differently. He sees from the way his team perks up that they felt it, too.
"Hey! The house just moved!" he chirps, willing them to make the best of it, "Wanna see what's on the other side of the door now? It probably won't switch again for a couple shichen!" He pops another dumpling in his mouth and a few up his sleeve, in case they have to run for it.
“Wei Ying,” Itachi says patiently, “did you just put a sticky dumpling in your sleeve? Do you want to wake up covered in ants? Both of you will finish eating and wash up before we investigate. Sasuke, you can lend him a clean yukata. We’ll wash and mend his later.” Despite his gentle, almost motherly tone, there’s something about Itachi that is very hard to disobey.
Wei Ying blushes again and tries to explain that you have to take everything with you, the House doesn't stay put and the other inhabitants don't stay put and so anything you put down doesn't stay put. But he is trying to explain around a mouthful of dumpling, and both crow boys are looking at him like... he doesn't want them to look at him like that. If they try to leave the room without taking their stuff with them, he'll tell them again.
For now, he has the very important task of eating Enough Dumplings (he eats the slightly linty, dirty ones from his sleeve while Itachi isn't looking.)
When he's so full he's kind of sore and urpy, he looks longingly at the dumplings that are left. But he's afraid if he bends forward to take another, some of what's in him will squish out. And he's done enough vomiting for this week, after that fever a couple naptimes ago. He'd mostly learned what to avoid, on the street, and hadn't had a bad-food episode for almost a year, but it turns out even with cultivation there are still some things that can give the great immortal-to-be tummyache.
Seeing that everyone has eaten their fill, Itachi gets an empty bento box from their luggage and packs up the leftovers. “We haven’t cleaned the bath yet, so we have to wash with towels for now. I’ll get fresh water. Sasuke, please choose clothes to lend Wei Ying. Wei Ying, please fetch more wood, it’s in the courtyard under the eaves.”
Before he knows it, Wei Ying is clean, dry, and dressed in an indigo robe printed with the same sunrise-fan motif as the other boys’. Sasuke even has a spare pair of sandals!
Itachi tossed the dirty water outside, wiped the wok out, and hung it on the wall, because it came with the house. The rest of their things get packed away, some of it in clever little scrolls.
“But aren’t we coming back?” Sasuke says. “We’ll just have to unpack again!”
Itachi raises an eyebrow.
This time, Sasuke makes a stubborn face instead of changing his mind.
Itachi says, “Should a shinobi leave his camp for others to find, do you think?”
Sasuke’s stubborn face is maybe covering worry. “But we’re coming back, though. Right?”
“I don’t know, otouto. Wei Ying says everything moves around.” To Wei Ying: “It would be ideal if we could keep this as our base of exploration. Do you have any thoughts on how we could do that?”
Wei Ying looks up from comparing his puckered dog bites to Itachi's near-invisible white lines, and blinks. "Mark it with something, so people know there's a group that'll defend it. Then - the doors have a pattern, sort of? Enough that the gangs mark the, the most common through-ways, the doors that usually connect to their territory eventually. But this space is new, it's not marked yet, so we don't know how it'll fit - I guess we can scratch a really shallow team mark on the thresholds, and make it deeper every time we go through." He frowns, and trots over to pat all their stuff. "Good, good. Qiankun scrolls! I gotta learn how to make those - are they easier than bags, or just lighter, or aesthetic, or - oh, what happens if they rip, though?!" That wasn't what he meant to say! "Um, UM. It's really good that you can carry everything, because you've got a lot of really valuable stuff and if someone found it they'd walk off with it. Only maybe not, because they wouldn't know what was in the scroll or that it held, I don't know, a full kitchen! And soap. But we might lose the wok if we leave it here."
Other very important knowledge to impart: "Stay away from stairs that go down into the dark. Make sure there's another exit before you go into a room, even just a window." He rubs his nose, remembering his faceplant against the crystal. "If the shadows start coming for you, run for daylight. If you can't get to daylight, fire will hold them off briefly. Three horizontal scratches on a door is BAD. Three almost-vertical, and a line across the top, like this - that's a trading hub. Okay?"
“Shadows?” Sasuke looks at his brother for reassurance.
“That sounds important,” Itachi agrees, “but we can discuss it while we walk. There’s something more time critical. Do you know what it is?”
“Um.” Sasuke looks around. “A… tracking seal…?”
“That’s a very good idea, but there’s something even before we leave the room.”
Since Sasuke isn’t coming up with anything, Itachi doesn’t draw it out. “The fire, otouto. It could spark and catch something.”
“Oh! What’s the… no, I remember…” He makes a series of hand signs, with one retry after a correction from his brother, and… pulls the fire out of the coals.
Wei Ying bounces in place, eyes wide. "You can control fire!? OH! OH! There's a room I have to show you!"
Itachi produces a spadelike knife and carves the sunrise fan neatly on the doorframe. The outer gate, of course, already has a big colorful one, but it’s wise to take the precaution in case the kitchen parts ways with the compound. Though if it was going to, maybe it already would have. He also places an invisible array that Wei Ying can only feel until Itachi’s hand leaves it; then it vanishes. The tracking seal he mentioned, probably.
He hands the knife to Wei Ying, and encourages him to tuck it in his sash. “Don’t fight with it unless you know how, but it’s an important tool anyway. I’m strong enough to protect you both, so stay close to me and don’t run unless I say. If we do get separated, try to get back here. Understood?”
Sasuke flails out a salute. “Haaaai!”
“Then here we go.”
And they sally forth.
They fall pretty easily into a formation. Itachi takes point, looking into rooms before they enter them. Wei Ying, usually holding onto Sasuke's hand, points the way from behind Itachi's right shoulder. Sasuke keeps an eye on their sides and rear from behind his left.
The rooms that are very strange to Wei Ying are more familiar to Itachi and Sasuke. He shows them, as though it's a mystery and a marvel, a blue-tiled bathroom with a shower stall (whose sliding door is the entry to the room, from this hall of sliding doors) and a chair-style toilet, and a sink with taps that turn (although no water comes out.) The window has frosted glass panes, and he climbs up on the toilet to knock on them, to show the crow boys just how flat and big the crystal-glass is, and boasts that he's seen bigger. Then he cranks them open, and hitches himself up on the sill, so he can reach out and pluck them oranges from the tree outside.
The orange tree has fruit and blossoms at the same time, so he snaps off a couple sprays of bloom, as well, and tucks them behind Sasuke and Itachi's ears.
“How strange,” Itachi says about the tree. “Do seasons change here?”
“Let’s grow an orange tree in the compound,” Sasuke says, and Itachi emits a complicated mixture of sadness and relief.
"They- you'll see. It goes with the room, you know? One room will go through a day from sunrise to sunset, and the room next to it might be on a noon-to-midnight schedule. This bathroom's summer, or somewhere tropical, but the burning temple is winter right now, but it has pictures of all the seasons so I think it isn't always."
“Hm, so then, it’s probably going to snow in our compound in winter. An orange tree wouldn’t survive,” Itachi tells Sasuke.
Sasuke makes a disconsolate face.
“Keep an eye out for cherries and plums,” Itachi tries, which mostly cheers him up.
"I'll take you to the burning temple," Wei Ying tells them, and he tries.
They come across one of the flooded rooms, first.
"Oh! I know this one! This is cool, the water just STOPS!" Wei Ying tells them, yanking the door open.
The flood has receded from the room with yellow walls, leaving furniture washed up skew-ways, and chest-high (on Itachi) mud marks. There's still almost knee-deep (on Sasuke) muddy water, that stops at the door and doesn't leak through, but the giant salamander swimming through it flops out at their feet and boggles at them with its beady, baffled eyes. It thrashes on the carpet until Wei Ying scoops it up and tosses it back in.
A log splits open at one end, revealing shell-pink maw and ivory teeth, and snaps it out of the air. Wei Ying slams the door closed.
Sasuke chokes off a scream, staring at the closed door from behind his brother, another of those spade like utility knives clutched in both hands. “Crocodile! Aniki!”
“I believe that’s an alligator,” Itachi muses. “It can’t open doors, otouto.”
“It might break through…”
“If so, they are edible.” He glances at Wei Ying. “You have ideas about how the water here and the fire elsewhere doesn’t escape.”
"Yeah! Well, kinda. What if - what if the rooms aren't exactly connected connected, like it's not physically - but there is something like a teleportation array that, that hooks the doors up, and lets living things through, but really that room is still connected to the other rooms in that house - in that world - and so the flood is continuous there and it doesn't spill out here because this - " he spins around the dilapidated living room they're in, "is in its own space, in its world." He pauses, panting a little, because that was a long explanation for a single breath. "I mean. It's my going theory, anyway."
“It’s a good theory. It explains our observations so far. What’s especially interesting is the idea that these are different worlds, not just different parts of the same world. I feel that too, almost as if the awareness of it is an observation I’m continually making. Like the temperature or the amount of light.”
“Me too!” Sasuke says wonderingly. “You can kinda just tell! And… the air changes. It’s humid in the old Uchiha house, and then it was dry in the first hall, and in the bathroom with the orange garden it smelled like it rained earlier… oh, oh, also! There isn’t anywhere in our world where people don’t know about glass or faucets!”
“Very good observations, Sasuke. Wei Ying’s world may be — hmm, what would the term be, younger? Or maybe technology advanced differently there.”
"So eventually my world might get big glass, and the plastic stuff, and, and ref... reflidj...cold boxes? Bu Yu said they were supposed to be cold, anyway, but they work without arrays so they need electricity, which is tiny lightning in wires around your home, but I guess you guys know about that, too, since you're from later! Or do you?"
“Uh-huh,” Sasuke says, “we have a refrigerator at home! But some of the older houses still have ice boxes instead. There’s an ice guy that comes around.”
Wei Ying pouts. "I want to be around to see that. Ohhh, maybe I could go back and invent all that stuff! But first I have to invent a way to go back, because - you can't."
Itachi is more focused on the other part. “You can’t what,” he asks. “Please differentiate between your own observations and information given by others, that will help us figure it out."
"Oh, I tried! Bu Yu found me almost right away, he's about your age Itachi-ge, but he's been here longer, and he could see Yiling through my door but I was like... there's nothing, you know, like - like I was blind when I looked through it. Where I looked through it. And the vents, and even the cracks in the wall, were the same! He showed me a couple rooms and the important signs and then he went out to work, and I tried to follow him, and I ended up in somebody's dry dock. And then I went BACK through the door I just came through, and it went to a hallway with a lot of doors, and none of them went back to the granary, but I could go back into the dry dock through that big door at the end, and I tried all the smaller doors and there was a kitchen and the blue bathroom and a room with a lot of chairs with trays attached, and some lady's bedroom! And she was still there!"
He pauses, and then adds, "Dead. And I guess she was okay being dead there, because I didn't have to fight her. It was a pretty fancy room. Anyway, I found my granary three more times, and I've slept... five times, and even though I can find my granary I can't see Yiling outside of it like I should."
“When you say she was dead there…” Itachi begins cautiously, and that’s how Wei Ying finds out that the crow boys’ world barely has any ghosts at all. Only the strongest or unluckiest dead leave even an echo, and fierce corpses never happen spontaneously. There are only a few people in recorded history who could make them on purpose, even.
“Do you think you could find your granary again?” Itachi asks when the younger boys take a breather from wild theorizing.
"Yeah! It's always one of the big doors - like double that one. There aren't as many of those, so if I find one and camp there until the House shifts, eventually it's my granary. There's a couple halls that have two of the big doors, one at each end, only some of them don't have windows so if the door has the, you know, three slashes on it, don't go in. Um, there's the dry-dock, and at least four halls-with-all-the-doors, and a really pretty fancy office, and the doors where the god should be in the burning temple, and my granary. I haven't been marking anything because I didn't have a team yet but I can find it easy enough and I wanted to show you the temple anyway."
“So if we find a gate like to our compound, but it doesn’t go there, we can wait and eventually it will?” Sasuke guesses. Itachi speculates, “The connections between rooms and worlds may be linked by similarities at the point of transition, then, which makes the whole business much more navigable. It may even be governed by an algorithm… Shisui would have had so much fun with that.” He sighs, melancholy, and Sasuke hugs him.
“Shisui-nii died,” Sasuke tells Wei Ying, “and stupid idiots said Itachi-nii killed him, and it was horrible.”
Wei Ying glimpses, perhaps, a reason these rich, clan-proud boys don’t seem very desperate to get home. Wei Ying adds himself to the hug.
Itachi gives really excellent hugs, very squeezy and safe.
Wei Ying holds on until Sasuke starts to wriggle a little, although he does keep an ear out for anything coming up on them and he knows Itachi's on guard, too.
Sasuke is warm, and his hair is as soft as a chicken butt on Wei Ying's face, and Itachi might be skinny and hard but his hugs are still comparable to Butchershop Nainai, whose bosom and laugh were legend. Wei Ying can hear his heartbeat under his sharp collarbone.
"I'm sorry your big brother died," he tells them, giving them one last squeeze, "We'll have to have all the fun he would've had, and then tell him about it."
“Hn,” Sasuke agrees firmly.
Itachi ruffles both boys’ hair.
They resume their search for the fire temple or the granary, whichever comes first. They haven’t been walking much longer, though, when Itachi stops and puts himself in front of them. “Someone’s coming.”