Chapter Text
Fan Xiao did not leave the apartment for a long time.
Time passed in a way he did not know how to measure anymore. Day and night blurred together, light shifting across the walls without his permission. He sat where he had been left, moving only when his body demanded it, as though motion itself required justification.
Sleep came in fragments, shallow and cruel. Every time he closed his eyes, memory filled the space Shu Lang once occupied. He began to look backward again, but this time not at arguments, not at cruelty, not at the moments he had already dissected until they bled dry.
He remembered the quiet ones. The business trip came to him one night without warning. They had been by the sea. Fan Xiao remembered how he had resisted going at first, irritation rising when Shu Lang suggested it casually, as though it were nothing. The sea had always been something he avoided without admitting why. Too vast. Too merciless. Too full of things that could not be controlled. His mother’s death had made sure of that. The memory had lived in him for years, water rising where it should not have, panic swallowing everything, a world that did not care how much he screamed or commanded it to stop. He had buried that fear deep, wrapped it in arrogance and rage, and told himself that nothing frightened him anymore.
Shu Lang had noticed anyway. They had walked slowly that day, the sound of waves reaching them before the water itself came into view. Fan Xiao remembered how his body had gone tense without him realizing it, shoulders tight, steps slowing. Shu Lang had stopped then.
“It’s alright,” he had said gently.“If you don’t want to look at it, we don’t have to.”
Fan Xiao remembered glancing at him sharply, ready for mockery that never came.
“We can go back to the room,” Shu Lang continued. “Close the doors. ...”
“What does President You want to do with me once we’re inside?” Fan Xiao teased, earning a small smile from Shu Lang.
“President Fan, ah,” Shu Lang chided lightly.
They had sat together instead, a little distance from the water. Shu Lang hadn’t pushed. He didn't ask questions. He simply stayed. For the first time in years, Fan Xiao had allowed himself to sit beside someone and look at the horizon without feeling like he was being pulled apart. The sea had still been there, endless, indifferent, but it had not swallowed him. He remembered the warmth at his side. The quiet. The strange, unfamiliar feeling had spread through his chest.He felt Peace. That feeling had made him immeasurably happy.
The realization struck him now like a physical blow. That man was the one he had cornered, humiliated, and controlled. The one he had bled dry because kindness was easier to exploit than resistance.
Fan Xiao pressed his hand against his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his clothes.
“What did I do to you?” he whispered hoarsely.
He had claimed to love Shu Lang. He had said it often. Loudly. Possessively. As though repetition could make it true. But love would have stopped. Love would have listened. Love would have remembered that moment by the sea and treated it as something sacred instead of something disposable.
Fan Xiao bent forward, elbows on his knees, head bowed.
“You helped me live with something I couldn’t face,” he murmured. “And I repaid you by destroying everything you were.”
Another memory followed, Shu Lang smiling faintly that day, eyes bright in the reflected light, as if simply being allowed to care had made him happy. As if protecting someone else’s wounds gave his own life meaning.
Fan Xiao felt something tear open inside him.
“I didn’t deserve that,” he said. “I didn’t deserve you.”
The words were useless now. He knew that. They changed nothing. But they carved their way out of him anyway, raw and unprotected, without the armor of justification he had worn his entire life. He had once believed suffering loudly was the same as repentance. Now he understood. This, this quiet, endless remembering was worse. There was no release. No audience. No forgiveness waiting at the end of it, only memory. Only the knowledge that he had been given something rare and gentle, and had chosen again and again to crush it in his hands.
Fan Xiao sat there as the light shifted across the floor, the sound of the world continuing without him, and for the first time, he did not try to escape the weight of what he had done. He let it stay.
Fan Xiao went back to the sea alone. He did not plan it. One morning he simply found himself driving without direction, the road unspooling beneath him until the air began to change, heavy with salt. When the water finally came into view, his hands tightened on the steering wheel, instinctive and immediate. He almost turned back.
The sea looked the same. Vast. Unconcerned. It had not softened with time. It had not learned restraint. Waves rose and fell with the same indifferent rhythm they always had, as if nothing in the world had ever been lost to it.
Fan Xiao stepped out of the car and stood there for a long time, the wind tugging at his clothes. The last time he had been here, Shu Lang had been beside him. He remembered the way Shu Lang had angled his body slightly, as though shielding him from something invisible. The way he had spoken without urgency, without expectation.
It’s alright.
We can go back.
Fan Xiao had not realized then what a gift that was, to be permitted to retreat without being judged for it. To be allowed fear without being diminished by it. Now there was no one to offer that kindness.
He took a few steps forward anyway. The sound of the waves reached him, steady and unrelenting. His chest tightened, the old memory stirring, water where there should have been air, helplessness closing in from every direction. For years, Shu Lang’s presence had made that memory survivable. Not erased, but held.
Fan Xiao looked around. There was nothing to hold it back now. He sat down heavily on the sand, head bowed, hands pressed into the ground as though anchoring himself. The happiness he had once felt here returned to him only as contrast, a cruel reminder of what had been possible.
“How did I ruin this?” he whispered.
He saw Shu Lang’s face again, calm and attentive, asking nothing in return for his care. Fan Xiao had taken that care and treated it like something renewable, something that could not be exhausted.
He stayed until the sky darkened, until the cold crept into his bones. The sea did not grant him peace this time. It offered no understanding. It simply existed, just as it always had. When he finally left, the emptiness followed him home.
Years passed. Fan Xiao continued to live. That, too, became part of the punishment. He moved through the world efficiently, mechanically. His days were orderly. Successful. Nothing outwardly suggested ruin. But the man he had once been, the one who believed control could replace love never fully returned. Neither did Shu Lang.
Fan Xiao learned that memory did not fade the way he had once assumed. It sharpened instead. Small things became unbearable: the way light fell across a room, the sound of quiet breathing at night, the instinct to turn and speak to someone who was no longer there.
Sometimes he dreamed of the sea. In those dreams, Shu Lang was always beside him, always patient, always gentle. Fan Xiao would wake with his chest tight, the realization settling in before his eyes even opened. He never tried to recreate what they had been. The thought felt obscene. There were moments meant to exist only once, with only one person. He carried the weight of that understanding with him everywhere.
On certain nights, when sleep refused to come, Fan Xiao would sit alone and replay the moments he should have stopped. Each time he had pressed harder instead of letting go. Each time he had mistaken endurance for consent, kindness for weakness.
'When should I have stopped?'
The answer never changed. At the very first moment, Shu Lang had asked him to. Fan Xiao had once believed death would be mercy for someone like him. Now he understood the cruelty of that belief. Living with memory intact, with understanding fully formed, with no path toward redemption, was far worse. And so Fan Xiao endured. Not because he deserved to, and not because there was anything left to hope for, but because the man he destroyed had once believed the world could be better, and Fan Xiao would carry the cost of proving him wrong for as long as he remained alive.