Work Text:
The lid closes with a resolute clunk. Xie Lian should have thought about how this could go wrong, but his own memory riddled with holes and the strength he gets from Hua Cheng at his side led him into the perfect storm. The lid closes and steals the light with it. Xie Lian’s heart races in anticipation of their escape from the island, and his proximity to his beloved. He can’t tell the difference between the pulse of adrenaline in his veins and the rock of the waves, but it’s loud and roaring.
The line between excitement and panic is always a thin thing, one wrong pluck away from discordance that wracks the brain and sears the senses until nothing is recognizable.
He thinks he can hear Hua Cheng talking to him, but it’s muffled somehow - buffered by an impenetrable distance of dirt, rock, and solid wood. His head is spinning, it’s tight, there’s barely even room to breathe. Of course, he wouldn’t get his own coffin. They just threw him in one, on top of some poor soul, trapped with him for all eternity. There’s no room to breathe, there’s no room to scream. His throat is raw and dry from seawater, his tears. He doesn’t know anymore.
Has he been screaming already? He can’t tell. How long has he been in here now?
Ah. It’s all been a dream.
He never got out. He bit out a disgusted, mean laugh. Of course, there is no out. Only more darkness. Only ever more loneliness. He desperately reaches out for any memory of his dream, willing to cling to even the fading wisps of comfort. All he gets is flashes of color and trust and longing, but he can’t pin any of it down. Something is scratching, clawing at the back of his mind, begging him to remember the name on the tip of his tongue, but it’s all lost in the darkness.
He shifts around but feels the familiar stab of sharp metal at his chest, and resigns himself. This is what he deserves.
The people stomping on his grave won’t stop talking; won’t stop teasing him with what he can never have. Why won’t they just shut the fuck up!–Ah. Silence.
It doesn’t take long until the silence speaks to him, too. Dark whispers of all his faults, to fall even further. It’s laughable at this point. How much lower could he even get? He’s struggled and clung and plead, and yet here he is, abandoned and alone. Just how it was always meant to be.
Xie Lian curses himself as fresh tears he didn’t know he had run down his face. He doesn’t know the last time he cried, always too dehydrated to muster anything, too hollow. He blames it on the dream. The flagrant wanderings of a madman, completely and utterly alone in the darkness, dreaming up someone to save him; to see his shattered self, gather him up, and gently put the pieces back together. Xie Lian curses himself. Who does he think he is to escape his haunting past?
A full body sob sends him into a shaking fit, his body rejecting the movement, but his desperation to knock himself back out, to get just a flicker of the dream back, is so strong. He rears his head back, aiming for that soft spot at the base of his skull. He puts all the strength he has into it, but in the end, he doesn’t even feel it at all. There’s a cool feeling at the back of his neck, and he wonders briefly if he’s bleeding, but he’s decidedly still awake.
The voices above him are talking again, louder now. He can almost make out what they are saying through the wet, wheezing sound in his chest. He strains to hear, desperate for the tiniest sliver. No matter how he tries, he can’t make out what they are saying. But the voice sounds… familiar?
Xie Lian has gone through this all before, has had his hopes crushed. But he curses the dream once again as his heart gives the faintest of jumps.
“FENG XIN!”
“MU QING!”
He’s so tired. Just breathing is so much work. But he gives one ending struggle. With all the force of his failing heart, he cries out,
“JUN WU!!”
His voice cracks. The silence is crushing. He’s too weak.
He can’t even curl into himself as he sobs and cries for his mother and father. That brings as little comfort as it did back then. As if the good could ever outweigh the bad. But he can’t stop, not the tears, not the people above him. He can’t even stop from hurting himself anymore.
His heart is a wound that never heals from his own war with himself. The husk of his being is a scar.
The pain stops having meaning. It chips further into him, leaving more of him crumbled, and before long he loses the energy to keep crying. The weight of himself is too much to bear. He’s held together by the coffin itself.
The pain in the coffin is devastating, debilitating, unending. But isn’t it the same out there? Hasn’t he only ever reached new peaks of torment outside of the coffin? Why is he fighting so hard to even get out? Maybe things are better here.
He can accept this. The pain comes from fighting. He knows this. Isn’t fighting the way of the world how he always gets himself into these situations. Of course, it’s his own fault.
If he lays still, this coffin could be paradise.
It’s softer than he remembers; the sharp pain against his chest seems to fade away, even though the pressure is still there.
He must be fading again. That feeling of warmth from his dream seeps through his very being, even though he’s only a ghost. He wants to feel more of it, leaning into it, even though he feels so far away.
It spikes fresh sorrow in his chest. A longing so strong; how could he have lost something so dear? He’s drowning in it now. The warmth, the love, chases after him, unrelenting and unstoppable even as Xie Lian falls deeper and deeper into himself. It breaks his heart. He wants it! More than he’s wanted anything in his life, wants to stop being so lost! To let himself be swept up. To feel it. Xie Lian can’t stand to spend one more second here.
It surges in him, GIVE IT BACK TO ME!
Xie Lian can hear him! Can hear him calling Xie Lian back to him, begging, pleading, just how Xie Lian has!
Everything hurts as Xie Lian screams again, wrenching his bones loose, straining the very threads of his being,
“HUA CHENG!! SAN LANG, SAVE ME! PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE I NEED YOU!”
“XIE LIAN! I’M HERE! PLEASE, PLEASE JUST OPEN YOUR EYES! I NEED YOU.” The voice, normally rich and deep, returns his call rough and broken, ripped open, revealing wounds just as deep as Xie Lian’s.
Xie Lian wretches and sobs and, with a monumental effort, opens his eyes through his tears.
He wails; flinging his arms around Hua Cheng’s neck pulling him down into Xie Lian, sending a spray of sand into the air. Everything is wet and garbled, the air heavy with the words neither of them can bring themselves to say.
Xie Lian has tangled them impossibly together, there is no end to one and beginning to another, only them. Together. There’s no way to tell how long Xie Lian stays here, clutching Hua Cheng until he calms down enough to extricate his face from the safety of his beloved’s neck.
His eyes are itchy and puffy as he blinks them open to a fading light. Everything is raw, chafed by sand, salt, and haunting memories. Xie Lian can barely lean far enough away to breathe before Hua Cheng’s hand on the back of his neck pulls him back into his tight embrace. Xie Lian begins coming back to himself a bit.
“San Lang. San Lang are you alright?” His voice comes out as barely more than a whisper.
Hua Cheng squeezes him before he replies, “Gege… You…”
“San Lang, I’m sorry, I-that was-it was like.”
“Gege, I thought I lost you,” Hua Cheng chokes out.
That feeling in his chest flares to life, constricting him until he’s immobilized again. Xie Lian gasps, the dread building that he’ll lose himself to the panic again.
Hua Cheng’s grip loosens to allow him to lean back and look at Xie Lian. The binding on his heart and lungs falls away under the overwhelming flood of emotion on Hua Cheng’s face–terror, relief, exhaustion, love, devotion. Xie Lian raises a hand to cup his face. Hua Cheng doesn’t waste a breath leaning into it, pressing his nose into the tender skin of his wrist, still refusing to break eye contact.
“I had lost you, beloved.” Xie Lian presses their foreheads together.