Chapter Text
Jing Yuan tells Yingxing to call him, if he needs anything, but he knows very well that the other man won’t. He’s always had something like the manner of an alley cat. Slinking in and warily accepting the bare minimum of care, when he most needs it, but disappearing at the faintest hint of movement, and hissing if he thinks someone’s looking a little too hard. In his youth Jing Yuan had delighted in teasing irritation and snappishness out of his reticence. After everything, when Yingxing ceased to be and Ren took his place, Jing Yuan had learned how to most effectively coax without seeming to do so, on those rare occasions when he’d crept up to the edges of Jing Yuan’s life. It’s an odd skill to have, learning to care for those who do not want your care, but it’s one that’s served him well in his long years.
His long, long years of carefully keeping tabs on Ren’s habits, his unspoken boundaries and tendencies, is what has him jerking to attention when he sees Yingxing’s name on his caller id. He wouldn’t call. Jing Yuan knows this. He wouldn’t call unless something was deeply, deeply wrong.
“Hello-” Jing Yuan can scarcely get the word out before he’s interrupted by Yingxing’s haggard voice.
“Help- Can you help?” Yingxing sounds bad. His breathing is ragged, uneven and rasping even through the phone receiver. It’s familiar in a way. Hello, old friend, Jing Yuan thinks. There he is, the man who walked beside me for the longest, despite how hard he tried to die.
“I’ll help,” he replies, gentle but carefully neutral. Not pitying, not patronizing. The racing urgency he feels as he climbs to his feet, steps into shoes hands-free, is carefully tucked away from his voice. “What’s wrong, are you safe?”
“I’m- Am I safe?” Yingxing repeats, sounding lost. “I don’t know, it’s- too much. There’s too much. I’m not supposed to be here, something’s not right-” He’s rambling, now. Disorganized and scattered and afraid.
“I’ll come to you. Don’t worry, I’m on my way.” Jing Yuan… honestly doesn’t know if his presence will help things or hurt. But he does know that this state tends to accompany dangerous decision making. And he knows that Yingxing no longer has an undying body to absorb the results of that decision making.
He keeps the call connected, in the car, just so that he can hear Yingxing, although Yingxing in his scattered state seems to forget he’s there, after a point. Even when he does, Jing Yuan can hear the muffled sounds of pacing, of ragged breathing. Of life.
He knocks on the door, and when Yingxing answers he looks surprised to see him, blinking up at him with dark, wild eyes.
“Why are you here?” Yingxing asks, even as he steps aside to grant Jing Yuan entry.
“You called me, do you remember?”
“Oh.” Yingxing seems unable to sit still, shifting from one foot to another, eyes never settling on one single point. “I guess I did. I… right. I thought you could help.”
“I hope I can. Yingxing-” Yingxing recoils at the sound of his name, a full-body flinch.
“That’s not my name,” he snarls, voice pitching up, his manner gone very suddenly from scattered and distant, to that of a cornered animal. “Don’t call me that- that’s- It’s not right.”
“All right. All right, what should I call you?” Jing Yuan keeps his shoulders relaxed, hands resting at his sides.
“Not that. Just- not that.”
“Ren then?” Jing Yuan asks, something sad sinking into his chest.
“Ren’s fine.” Yingxing settles a little then, but he’s still anxious, running his hand through his hair haphazardly, still pacing the length of the living room, eyes darting from exit to exit like he’s afraid of being caged.
“Ren, do you remember why you called me? You wanted me to help.”
“Right- Right. I thought you could help. You won’t though.” Very suddenly, Ren is still, his dark eyes boring into Jing Yuan.
“You didn’t, before. You never helped. Didn’t do anything, not until it was over. Not until I- Until it didn’t matter.” With each accusation Ren advances on him, something about it focusing him, fixing his mind on that one topic. Jing Yuan finds himself frozen, his throat closed up around whatever platitudes he has to offer. It’s an old accusation. It’s an accurate one, too. Not one that he has a good response to. But more than that, he’d thought maybe it was one he was free of. One that he could be absolved of, with Yingxing’s rebirth. What a selfish fantasy. Of course he couldn’t be absolved so simply.
“I need an answer! Why didn’t you help? Why isn’t this- all of this, why isn’t it helping? You brought me into this- brought me back to the past- why couldn’t you just leave it alone? It hurts- It hurts so much worse now.” His accusations turn to pleading, and Jing Yuan finds his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth. Even when Ren siezes the front of his shirt, and then shakes him, with a strength Jing Yuan hadn’t known he still had, he stays mute. Struck dumb by the raw admissions of pain, more blatant than they ever had been, before. Before, he’d only borne witness to Yingxing’s corpse, and then to his alley-cat tendencies. He’d dragged himself into the shadows to lick his wounds, and Jing Yuan had been spared having to recon with his pain.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers hoarsely, when Ren shakes him again, and Ren lets out a frustrated noise, releasing him to storm away across the room, and then back.
“That’s not good enough! That’s not- You’re still not doing anything. Are you really this useless?” Ren says it like it’s a real question. Looks at Jing Yuan searchingly, pleadingly. Looking for anything to ease his pain. Jing Yuan doesn’t have anything. All he has is himself. He’s been a bystander in all his centuries of life, but that’s a pathetic excuse.
“I can’t undo what was done,” he says gently. “This, I can’t take away.” Ren shudders, closes his eyes, scrubs a hand down his face. Collapses into a sitting position on the couch and buries his head in his hands. For several minutes, the room is silent besides his ragged breathing. He stays silent and still for so long, Jing Yuan wonders if he’s worn himself out, before Yingxing speaks again.
“I dream about it,” He says wretchedly, voice heavy, aching. “About you. Him. About changing. Dying. Do you know how much it hurts, to die?” He asks the question, but doesn’t seem to need an answer.
“I do. I don’t want to. I wish you weren’t here. I wish I wasn’t the one who had to be half a ghost.”
Jing Yuan doesn’t have a good answer for that, but Yingxing seems to be done talking, anyways. He stays silent, right there on the couch, until dawn starts to break.
Yingxing wakes up on his couch, with a throbbing pain in his head, and in the rest of his body. He groans, stirs, blinks his eyes open and then scrunches them closed again and flops back down. Last night had been… bad. It had been a long time, since he last lost touch with the present like that, but Dan Feng’s face had imprinted itself behind his eyelids, the harbinger of misery in this life as well as the last. He’s contemplating whether he has the will to rise and make some coffee, when a low voice filters through the pounding in his temples.
“You should drink some water.” Yingxing’s eyes fly open at the sound of a strange voice, though he immediately flinches away at the sharp stab of sunlight into his corneas. Whatever he was going to say is lost in the groan he lets out. There’s the sound of shuffling, rustling and movement, and when he opens his eyes again, the curtains have been drawn, and Jing Yuan is standing an odd distance away, a glass of water in hand. Yingxing grunts, and holds out his hand for the cup. At the gesture, something in Jing Yuan’s manner eases, and he steps forward to press the glass into his hand. Then he holds out the other hand, and when Yingxing’s own rises to meet it, he deposits an aspirin there as well.
“What’re you doing here?” Yingding mumbles, and his voice sounds awful. He sounds and feels like he’s been gargling rocks.
“You were having a bad night, and you called me. I wanted to stay, and make sure you were all right.” Jing Yuan’s voice is perfectly level. Yingxing has never heard him sound anything other than masterfully in control of himself, and it’s grating even at the best of times. Right now, it’s a cruelly stark counterpart to how he feels.
As Jing Yuan says it, he does remember vaguely letting Jing Yuan into the house last night. His appearance in Yingxing’s living room had blended itself seamlessly into his appearance in his bloody, torturous dreams.
“You were here all night? What, just standing in my living room?” he asks, blinking up at Jing Yuan, though he scowls when Jing Yuan cocks his head, and smiles blithely. He just knows that whatever comes out of his mouth next will be bullshit.
“I sat a little while. You have very nice kitchen furniture,” Jing Yuan says, nodding playfully at the single, rickety chair which constitutes the only other possible seating place in the room.
“Shut up. Seriously, don’t you have to keep a normal schedule? You’re a teacher.I’m pretty sure that take precedence over babying me.” Yingxing scowls even more deeply. The fact that he’d stayed up all night, seemingly, rankles.
“You shouldn’t worry about it, it's the least I can do. I’m pretty sturdy, you know. A little lost sleep is nothing.” He almost believes Jing Yuan. There’s something wrong, he thinks, something gnawing on the edge of his awareness, but he often feels like that around Jing Yuan. His temples still throb in time with his pulse, though and he’s too tired to interrogate it at the moment. Yingxing huffs a sigh, and tilts his head back against the cushion of the couch wearily.
“Whatever,” he grumbles. “Run yourself into the ground if you want, I don’t care.” The words ring familiar, as if he’s said them a million times before, and a stab of pain punches through his temples so sharply that black spots multiply in front of his eyes. Jing Yuan chuckles at that though, an honest laugh that sounds almost like it’s surprised at itself, and that almost makes it worth it.
“I appreciate the concern,” Jing Yuan says warmly. Yingxing’s shut his eyes against the dim light of the living room, but he can hear Jing Yuan moving again. “I’ll leave you to your rest now. Please call me, if there’s anything I can do.”
Yingxing grumbles something unintelligible at that, but Jing Yuan seems to accept it as the farewell it is, because Yingxing hears the door open, and then close. Something about the perpetual deja-vu he feels around Jing Yuan is exhausting to him this morning, and he feels his chest unclench with the soft click of the door, and the cool, true silence of solitude.