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There is a sword in his hand.
The hilt is sized perfectly to his grip. This weapon was made for him. He holds it in grief, the weight of it almost too much to bear, all his failings stacked upon it. There is blood on the blade. The sword is thrust through another man ’s chest. Blood covers pale robes, staining them red. There is blood on his hands as he grips the hilt. A croaked voice mutters, soft and too intimate for such a statement: “Er-ge, stay and die with me.”
He looks up and for the first time he has had this dream, the face of the man saying it is not in shadow. There are wide eyes, fanned by dark lashes, and dark lips stained with blood.
He knows that face.
Lan Huan wakes up screaming.
He is thirty-four years old when his night terrors gain shape. Before, they were just a distant perception of dread, the sense of his entire world collapsing into dust around him. His dreams have always been strange, recollections that faded upon waking until the details were impossible to recall.
The nightmare comes to him on a chilly night in early November, as the darkness draws in, with autumn leaves already fallen on the ground. He’d returned to Suzhou after a trip to Yichang to see his brother, for Wei Ying’s thirtieth birthday. His apartment—the same apartment he used to share with Lan Zhan—was small, tidy and quiet, filled with salvaged things they’d collected together. An antique wooden Xiao sits in the spare room, alongside an upright piano and a space for Lan Zhan’s guqin, and shelves upon shelves of musical notation line one wall.
It is still dark when he crawls from his bed and enters the kitchen in search of some water. He fills a glass and then places one wrist, then the other, under the cool running stream of water. He is no longer dreaming. He still cannot shake the memory of it. He takes his glass and moves to the window of his living room, and stares out across the city. There are cars moving below, and lit windows of people who do not sleep. All Lan Huan can think of is the face of the man who had stared at him and asked if Lan Huan would die with him.
He’d met that man, three days prior, in passing.
Those dark eyes had caught his attention, even before his subconscious had decided to entwine his visage with the foreboding sense of dread that has dogged his dreams since his childhood. He’d wanted more than Wei Ying’s sister cursorily introducing them as Lan Huan passed by: “This is Meng Yao, Meng Yao this is Lan Huan, he’s Wei Ying’s partner’s brother.” Yanli had swiftly moved on, pulling Lan Huan over to Jin Ling, who had just joined his school’s soccer team and wanted to tell everyone about it. Lan Huan had meant to go back, introduce himself properly, but Meng Yao—whoever he was, and whatever the reason he had been at the party—had always seemed to manage to be where Lan Huan wasn’t that evening.
Lan Huan demarcates his life as before Wei Ying and after Wei Ying.
He is not the one in a relationship with Wei Ying, for all the significance of that statement. That does not mean that Wei Ying’s existence had not profoundly transformed his own life.
One Friday afternoon, a little over ten years ago now, Lan Huan had received a text message from Lan Zhan, simply reading: I will not be home tonight. Do not worry. Lan Huan had considered it odd. He hadn’t been too concerned. He’d hoped it meant something good. Lan Zhan was always so particular.
Lan Zhan had not come home Friday night. Or Saturday night.
He’d returned on Sunday morning, in the same clothes Lan Huan had last seen him in, with a grinning young man besides him. They’d been holding hands, fingers interlaced together. The young man had a series of very obvious bite marks down his neck, stretching from just below his ear, tracing along the edge of his jaw, down to his collarbone and disappearing beneath the edge of the shirt he was wearing.
“Brother, this is Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan had said, as if that was all that needed saying, and perhaps it was.
Wei Ying had lit into a smile even wider than the one he’d already been wearing. “Lan Huan, you’ve taken such good care of Lan Zhan all these years, hey?” which had been a strange thing to say, but Lan Huan had brushed past that because he was so delighted with Lan Zhan’s clear happiness to spend too much time thinking about the first words Wei Ying had said to him, or that he’d never heard Lan Zhan mention Wei Ying before.
Wei Ying had become a fixture from that moment on, and everything that used to be just Lan-Huan-and-Lan-Zhan had become Lan-Huan-and-Lan-Zhan-and-Wei-Ying.
In the new year he returns to Yichang, to Lan Zhan and Wei Ying’s home, where he spends a week in their guest room. It’s just like the early days when Wei Ying had moved into Lan Huan and Lan Zhan’s apartment in Suzhou, and it feels like home. He’s considered moving to Yichang a half-dozen times since they moved out this way, but rejected it, not wanting to impede on the space Lan Zhan has made for himself.
“You’d be welcome to,” Wei Ying says, on a Wednesday evening, as his family gathers in his home, all of them packed in, the odds and ends he’s collected over the years. “Lan Zhan worries, with you in Suzhou on your own.”
Lan Huan wants to protest he is not on his own; he has colleagues and friends. He is well liked at the running club he attends, and adored by the small gaggle of children at the music club he volunteers at, and he would miss those things if he came to Yichang.
But looking at Lan Zhan and Wei Ying’s family, all gathered, he cannot deny he is lonely.
He would struggle to gather a group of people like this.
It is a perfect scene; Jiang Yanli smiling as she brings another tray of baked goods out from the kitchen; Jiang Cheng dashing up to help her; Jin Zixuan and Jin Ling arguing over how much sugar the boy should be allowed. Wen Qing chimes in with some common-sense facts about how the boy had already had too much. Wen Ning, her brother, was sat besides her, and their cousin Wen Yuan was on the floor at their feet, staring at Lan Zhan who was sat behind a Guqin preparing to play.
“I’ll consider it,” he tells Wei Ying.
He and Lan Zhan are not brothers by blood. They are related; they share a great-grandfather, who Lan Huan met once and Lan Zhan never did. Lan Zhan had spent the first seven years of his life with his mother, and only his mother, until she had died and Lan Huan’s uncle—the man raising him after his own parents had died—had been the one to take responsibility, for lack of any closer relatives, reasoning that it could not be much harder to bring up two young boys close in age than it was one.
A rock hits his shoulder.
There is a firm hand on his chest, pushing him backwards, pushing him away. He falls into someone else ’s arms, but he doesn’t see them, can’t do anything except stare in horror as A-Yao falls away.
There is so much blood, blood that is not his own, and it is on his fingers and seeping into his skin and he might never be clean of it.
The hand clutching his arm pulls him away as more rocks fall. They are dressed the same as he is, in white, long sleeves billowing and there is another man in black who follows them out, and when Lan Huan looks up —
He wakes, and Lan Zhan is hovering at the bedroom door, and he knows he must have screamed in the night. “Xiongzhang,” Lan Zhan whispers, into the dark, and that’s not a word Lan Zhan has ever used to address him. Yet, somehow, it is the only one he can imagine falling from Lan Zhan’s lips at that moment. “You are safe.”
Wangji, Lan Huan wants to say, and that isn’t right either, and so he swallows it down, back in the place he keeps all these things that do not make sense.
Wei Ying appears then, over Lan Zhan’s shoulder, with a glass of water in hand. He walks into the bedroom, dressed only in his dark boxers and a short red robe pulled tight around him, and places the glass on the nightstand. “Lan Huan,” he says, crouching besides the bedside. “It was just a dream.”
It felt more like a memory.
(“He is starting to remember,” Lan Zhan says, after the third time they have both awoken to Lan Huan screaming in the night.
Wei Ying, draped over his soulmate’s chest, sighs. For both of them, the memories had come back all at once as they’d locked eyes in an alleyway, Wei Ying scrabbling over a wall, bottle in hand. It had been so like one of the first times they’d met, Wei Ying with jars of Emperor’s Smile, on the walls of Cloud Recesses. They’d known immediately who they were to each other. “It figures,” he says. “One chance encounter with Jin Guangyao—”
“They were always connected,” Lan Zhan replies. “You remember how brother mourned.”
“I do, and it’s why I wish he didn’t have to go through it again.”)
In his brother’s kitchen, Lan Huan chops vegetables as directed by Jiang Yanli, and says: “You brought someone to Wei Ying’s birthday, last year.”
Lan Huan does not know how to say: I have dreamed of him weekly since then. I have dreamed of him with a sword in his chest and he asks me to die with him. He does not know how to ask: I need to see him again.
“Oh, Meng Yao,” Yanli says, as if Meng Yao’s entire existence has not upended Lan Huan’s. “He was a business associate of A-Xuan’s father, he was helping us unravel the whole mess.” Jin Zixuan’s father had died a few years back, leaving behind a company riddled from head to toe with corruption and half-a-dozen previously unknown about bastard children. “He was with us, and it seemed rude to leave him out when we dropped in on Wei Ying, so, we invited him to the party. Now that it’s all sorted I don’t think we’ll be seeing him again.”
Lan Huan hides his disappointment.
On a wet spring day, when Lan Huan is walking along the waterfront with an umbrella in hand, someone collides with his arm.
He is knocked back, umbrella shaking cold drops of water everywhere. The person who walked into him stumbles, falling, and Lan Huan finds himself reaching for them. His hand clasps around slight fingers, his ring finger brushing against a knuckle, as he stops the man from colliding with the ground.
Their eyes meet, and Lan Huan finds himself staring at the same dark eyes that haunt his dreams.
Meng Yao looks away.
“Sorry.” He brushes himself off, pulling his hand away as he balances back on his own two feet.
Lan Huan just keeps staring.
He has been dreaming of this man—or maybe not this man, but one who shares his face—in these vivid nightmares for months. He wakes up screaming over them. He has seen this face covered in blood, crushed beneath the weight of stones, twisted and screwed up as it begs forgiveness at Lan Huan’s feet.
The man before him has shorter hair, cut so it falls artfully across his face, and there is no vermilion mark between his brows. His eyes and dark lashes and sweet mouth are still the same.
“A-Yao,” Lan Huan says, the affectionate name slipping from his mouth, and Meng Yao startles.
“Er-ge.” The word slips from him just as easily, and then he clamps his mouth shut. “Excuse me.” He pushes his way past Lan Huan, shaking off the hand that reaches for him.
Lan Huan loses him in the crowd before he can move to follow.
He dreams not of the temple that night.
Instead, he is standing in a walkway, and a vibrant young man with braids in his hair is approaching him, smile on his face. He looks lighter than Lan Huan has ever seen him. These robes are not of the heavy gold silk he is accustomed to; they are something simpler, and he is fonder of them for it. The boy bows, and Lan Huan raises his arms to lift him out of it, because there is no need for the boy to be bowing to him.
Lan Huan ’s hands grip slender forearms and—
He is bleeding and his limbs are weary with exhaustion and he is tucked into a cave and barely conscious and still the boy is bowing and he cannot do that, for Lan Huan owes this boy his life, and Lan Huan lifts him out of it and says that they are peers and the boy still does not seem to believe it.
He is standing in a banquet hall draped in red and black and the boy is back in those familiar golden robes and he is bowing again, this time with a smile and the address of “Er-ge” ringing in Lan Huan’s ears.
He is dashing forward to stop another bow, because this time the boy is their host, and he should bow to no one like that, not even Lan Huan, even as Lan Huan welcomes the contact, the brush of his palm against a bare wrist as he returns the boy to his full height.
A-Yao never seems to stay in his arms; Lan Huan watches him walk away too many times.
(Meng Yao has seen Lan Huan three times in this life;
The first, he’d turned and walked away before Lan Huan had noticed him. Lan Huan was beautiful, and he was happy, and he was smiling, and there was nothing Meng Yao could bring him in this life but grief.
The second, he hadn’t known Lan Huan was there until the man is in front of him, and Yanli is introducing them, and Meng Yao can only observe the basic niceties before spending the rest of the evening avoiding Lan Huan, because there is an intrigued look in his eye and Meng Yao knows that if he is granted even an hour of Lan Huan’s time, he may never let the man go.
The third, he runs from. It was an accident, and Meng Yao had fled from Lan Huan’s touch, because he might be a better person now than he was back then, but he still has nothing good to grant Lan Huan.)
Spring turns into summer, heat rising, and the dreams take a new shape again.
He sits in a study —his study, he guesses, from how the room seems to match the clothes he is wearing, and how it does not match his companion ’s—and they talk and discuss and exchange plans and make preparations and it is easy and it is soothing. It is like this is where he was always meant to be.
After the talking, there is tea, and then A-Yao is right there next to him, hand lifted, thumb brushing against the bone of his cheek, a pale ribbon entangled in his hand, and then he is kissing Lan Huan with hands threaded through that long black hair. A-Yao is in his lap, pulling Lan Huan ’s robes free from his belt, pushing them from his shoulders, and Lan Huan is arching up into him, hard against his thigh, and—
He wakes, sticky, and thinks: that’s new.
Meng Yao is, objectively, a beautiful man—perhaps the most beautiful man Lan Huan has ever set eyes upon—but he is still someone Lan Huan has met all of twice, both times in passing, and whatever connection Lan Huan feels between them...
How can he dream of love, of soft affection, days spent in quiet harmony, when he knows it ends with Lan Huan’s blade between Meng Yao’s ribs?
The autumn he turns thirty-five years old, he meets an old schoolfriend who he has not seen in almost two decades for lunch. Lan Huan is drawn to seek him out after two weeks of itching in the back of his skull, a feeling that he must have missed something.
Nie Mingjue is much as Lan Huan remembers him, only—the Nie Mingjue Lan Huan knew at school did not have a moustache, and his hair had been short and cropped close to his head, and Nie Mingjue now has hair that is long and pulled into an intricately braided bun at the top of his head, and so—
Lan Huan is getting so muddled these days.
Nie Mingjue lies before him, bleeding out, and there is a boy Lan Huan does not recognise reaching for him, A-Yao clutched around him and holding him back, and Lan Huan ’s entire heart is breaking and he does not know why.
There is snow and he is but a child and his uncle is holding his hand and there is a child kneeling in the snow and —
Lan Huan knows this young boy ’s face, had pulled the same child from his knees at his mother’s funeral, and he wants to do the same now, pull Lan Zhan to his feet and keep him somewhere safe, somewhere he is never hurt again.
He cannot.
“Are you okay, Lan Huan?” Wei Ying asks, on a video call, when Lan Zhan is out the room for a moment. “You don’t look like you’ve been sleeping.”
He is on his knees by a bedside, a damp cloth in hand, cleaning away blood from open wounds on a back. He does not know how they got there but he knows that he is in some way responsible, and he is horrified at the very thought of it.
The sheets are white. The skin is pale. The blood marks everything it touches. There is long dark hair spilled across a pillow, bound only by a white ribbon, a ribbon that is a twin to the one Lan Huan wears in these dreams. The man turns his face and —
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says, a plea that is as desperate as Lan Huan has ever heard, and somehow he knows Wei Ying is not here, that Wei Ying will not come, that there is nothing Lan Huan can do to give Wei Ying back to his baby brother.
He gets on a train to Yichang, the next day, because it’s not enough to look at all the happy pictures he has of Lan Zhan and Wei Ying together, not enough to know that Lan Zhan could never be marked like that, he has to see them. He doesn’t tell them he’s coming.
He steps off the train into the December chill, thankful he remembered his gloves and scarf at least, but he has no hat, so his ears take the brunt of the cold. It is raining again, and he struggles to pop open his umbrella as he gathers his wits, wondering if he should call Lan Zhan first or just find a cab that’ll take him straight to their door. His gaze is drawn across the street to where a young man is walking, dressed in white, white umbrella held above him, and those eyes—
He falls to his knees.
“A-Yao,” he shouts, crying the name, and the head turns, and it’s—it’s A-Yao, Meng Yao, Jin Guangyao, Lianfang-zun—and the man freezes, and then he’s running over, his own umbrella dropping to the floor as he crouches at Lan Huan’s side and cups his face in his hands.
“Er-ge,” A-Yao says, and it’s right, right that Lan Huan is A-Yao’s second brother, because there had been three of them once.
Lan Huan leans forward and collapses, sobbing, into Meng Yao’s chest.
He doesn’t remember what happens next, which is funny, because now he does remember—he remembers a life lived before this one, one where he was the Sect Leader of Gusu Lan, and where Lan Zhan was his baby brother by blood, and Wei Ying was Lan Zhan’s soulmate who he’d spent sixteen years searching for, and A-Yao...
A-Yao is not there when he comes back to himself.
Lan Zhan and Wei Ying are, though. Lan Zhan is holding his hand, the three of them still just outside the train station, and Wei Ying is holding a large red umbrella above them, keeping the worst of the water off them.
It takes Lan Huan a moment to place them, to put Lan Zhan in his sleek grey coat and blue trousers and Wei Ying in a black and red hoodie over ripped jeans, instead of the immaculate robes of white and black he expects.
“Ah, Lan Huan,” Wei Ying says, smiling. “Come on, let’s get you home and dry.”
Wei Ying drives. Lan Zhan sits in the back of the car with him, holding his hand all the while. As soon as they reach home, Lan Huan is bundled into a hot shower, with a set of clothes—his own, old, left here another time—laid out for him. When he emerges, there is a steaming mug of tea set aside for him, and sweet treats on a plate, and Wei Ying and Lan Zhan are sitting across from him.
He stumbles over the words, the entire story seeming impossible, but it is one that Wei Ying and Lan Zhan already know well.
“How long have you known?” Lan Huan asks Lan Zhan later, though he suspects he knows the answer to the question.
“As long as I have known Wei Ying.”
Lan Huan thinks of the people they have gathered around themselves as family, so many of whom are now familiar twice over. “Does anyone else remember?”
“Wen Qing,” Lan Zhan answers. “And it seems, Meng Yao.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He has been dreaming for over a year now. It has haunted him, the ghost of a memory of another life, his dreams bleeding into reality, unable to untangle the two.
“We didn’t wish to inflict the burden of your past life on you,” Lan Zhan replies. “It was not an easy one.”
He is standing on the edge of a lake, looking out across a pier, and there is a man in white, holding a flute, white ribbon threaded through dark hair.
This is a dream.
It is Meng Yao who stands before him, but this was not part of their past lives; it was only ever a wish. Meng Yao never donned the Lan whites and blues. Lan Huan never made Meng Yao his, not in that way.
This is a dream, and yet it is a memory, because the dream belongs not to Lan Huan of now, but of Lan Huan as he was then.
Meng Yao is already there when he arrives at the coffee shop, with a cup of tea steaming in front of him. The tea is for Lan Huan. It is precisely how he likes it.
Of course. A-Yao does not forget things, and his tastes have not changed from one life to the next.
“Why did you run from me?” Lan Huan asks, because he knows now, he knows that each time they have met Meng Yao has known exactly who Lan Huan is.
“Er-ge.” Meng Yao’s voice is soft. “Lan Huan. Surely you must know why.”
Here is the thing: Lan Huan does not.
He understands that in another life, Meng Yao hurt him. Meng Yao killed people, people Lan Huan loved. He caused Lan Zhan hurt. He’d have seen the world burn, if it had pleased him. Lan Huan had plunged a sword into Meng Yao’s chest.
And yet…
Had Meng Yao let him, had Meng Yao not pushed him away, to where Lan Zhan was waiting to pull him clear...
Lan Huan would have stayed.
He would have died with Meng Yao and he would have been content.
“No,” he says, reaching for Meng Yao’s hand. He strokes a thumb over Meng Yao’s knuckles. “I don’t.”
Meng Yao tilts his head. His hair looks soft, and Lan Huan wants to reach over and tuck it behind his ears, comb his hands through it at the end of a long day. He used to do that, he knows, in the Hanshi or in Jin Guangyao’s private quarters; he’d unpin A-Yao’s hair and comb out the ends and—if feeling particularly daring that night—would press a kiss to the back of A-Yao’s neck.
“I caused you enough pain in our last life,” Meng Yao says, but he does not move to take his hand back. “I have never wanted to harm you. How could I bring you pain in this one?”
Lan Huan entwines his fingers with Meng Yao’s. “How do you still not understand, A-Yao, that a life lived without you is not one in which I can truly be happy.”
(In this life, Meng Yao has killed no one. He has wrought revenge in different ways, upon those who it was due. He’d dismantled his father’s company and ruined any legacy the man hoped to leave behind. He had ensured—perhaps not through entirely legitimate means—that Wen Ruohan had been tried and found guilty of his crimes.
He is still sharp. He is still a weapon to be wielded, pointed at a target and unleashed. He cannot help who he is. He lies, and he manipulates, and he remakes the world around him as he wants it.
In this life, he has let himself be guided by the memory of Lan Huan, in those last moments. Lan Huan, who would have stayed. Lan Huan, who even at the end, after all those terrible things Jin Guangyao had done, still loved him enough to stay.
It will take another lifetime, at least, to be worthy of that love, but Meng Yao wants to try.)
The rain hammers against the umbrella Lan Huan holds above their heads, Meng Yao tucked close in an attempt to stay dry. The view across the water is beautiful, spring greens starting to sprout, with a glimmer of clear skies in the distance, but neither of them is looking out across it; instead, their eyes are locked on each other.
Lan Huan uses the hand that is not holding the umbrella to brush a piece of stray hair behind Meng Yao’s ear. “There was a dream I had,” he says, “in which you wore Lan white.”
“I never did,” Meng Yao replies. “It must have been an actual dream, A-Huan.”
“A dream I had then, and a dream I have now.” He’d been beautiful like that, almost ethereal, and Lan Huan had wanted and wanted and wanted. “I was a fool not to ask you to.”
“I would not have said yes, Er-ge,” Meng Yao answers. “Not in that life.”
“And in this one?”
Lan Huan is thirty-six, and it is raining, and neither of those things matter, because the love of two lifetimes is sleeping in his arms, and that night:
He does not dream.