Chapter Text
It had dragged on for two weeks.
Two weeks were not that long of a span of time in the course of a human life. It was barely enough time to study for a major exam, as Jiang Xi had heard from his interns and residents complaining of their time in medical school. It was barely enough time for the moon to fatten, barely enough time for the tiny leaves within a seed to unfurl from its sprout, and surely, in the greater scheme of the universe, two weeks were but a single grain of sand in the massive hourglass of existence. Jiang Xi knew all of this for certain. But two weeks were a long time for a fever to burn, and Jiang Xi also knew that there was nothing comforting about a fever that simmered just barely above where his temperature should be.
He was not too ill to work. He had forced himself out of bed every morning, downed a full glass of warm water, and shivered in his silk pajamas as he stared at his reflection in the bathroom mirror.
Perhaps it was his vanity, but Jiang Xi was suddenly quite glad for his decision to install warm golden light in his house.
The surgery was nowhere near as complex as to require his full attention, but he gave all he could anyway. The room was freezing. Operating theaters tended to be on the cooler side, Jiang Xi knew, and cursed himself, the hospital, the profession of medicine as a whole, for this habit of wearing only thin scrubs covered by disposable gowns that offered barely any protection at all from the air conditioning that this accursed building administrator refused to lower.
He owned this damn hospital. He should have commanded it. He made a note to himself, knowing that the thought would soon dissipate once the surgery was over and he could make his way back to his own office and shrug into a thicker cardigan, where he could order a warm tea to be served by a cowering intern, and shiver in his marginally more comfortable seat until another surgery required his attention.
You need to eat, he heard someone’s voice said, and swatted it away in annoyance.
Even if he could find the will to eat, Jiang Xi highly doubted that his stomach was capable of keeping anything but water down at this point.
The team carried on. The scrub nurse passed him the scalpel, another on the other side with a tray awaiting his soiled scissors. He was drowning, and he was burning, and the fever that had lingered for the last two weeks had finally decided to ignite. It must have been the dehydration. The malaise settled into the crevices of his bone, the grogginess dredging at his joints, slowing down his reflexes. In any case, this surgery was supposed to be a demonstration to the new interns rather than anything particularly groundbreaking. He was beyond seeking acclaim at this point in his life. A cholecystectomy that he had done a thousand times before, too banal for him to even register the patient underneath the knife. The draped areas seemed to blur in with the white floor, and Jiang Xi blinked slowly, willing his vision to steady on the incision site.
The surgery was almost finished; the gallbladder had given him no trouble at all, as he knew it would not. Around him, the interns made quiet, tittering sounds as his assistant placed the removed organ onto a tray, shushed quickly by the older residents before he could turn to glare at them. He only needed to close up. Just ten more minutes, he thought, and waded through that water, furious at his body for being so close to shore and still choosing this moment to give way to weakness.
Too close was still too far when there was no more air to breathe. At that point, the body ceased its movements, even if it was only one more meter until one’s hand touched the grounding earth. “You close,” he found himself saying to the lead resident across from him. The boy was young, only two years out of medical school, and eager to prove himself. Jiang Xi knew that he would do a passable job if he wasn’t always so afraid of looking directly at Jiang Xi.
The room spun.
“Thank you, Dr. Jiang,” he heard in a rush, the voice squeaking with excitement. The scalpel shook in his hand. Jiang Xi jutted his chin forward; as if reading his mind, the intern next to him immediately swiped a towel over his forehead, absorbing the dampness and some of the cold. The touch, through two layers of paper and latex, was far too comforting for his liking, and Jiang Xi jerked back.
It was, perhaps, in hindsight, the wrong move for someone who was already unsteady on his feet to begin with. The blood rushed in his ears, and Jiang Xi’s eyes widened as he scrambled to find purchase. His shoes had been made precisely to prevent any slipping in the operating theater, but that was little consolation when it was his knees that had decided to give out at last.
Clang.
He was underwater. The bright light above glared at him, sunlight filtering through the ocean waves, and he must have been under a particularly high crest because the light flickered, dimmed, and eventually, Jiang Xi could no longer make out its glow. The eight suns converged, blinked out of existence, and Jiang Xi wondered if this was the herald of the end of time awaiting them all. An inevitable conclusion.
Or maybe this was just the failing of his body alone.
“Doctor!” he heard, and Jiang Xi opened his mouth as if to respond.
It was too late. The darkness rushed forward, and he was swept away in its warmth.
Finally.
He woke up to rhythmic beepings.
“You gave me quite a scare.”
It was as if someone was pounding at his temple, cleaving it open to stuff something inside, and Jiang Xi decided that if that were to be the case, he would have preferred a cleaner cut. He could have done a better job himself had they given him his scalpel back.
There was a hand on his cheek, cool against his heated skin. “Your fever got worse.”
“Good.”
His voice was raspy. He cleared his throat as carefully as he could, trying his best to avoid agitating that dormant beast lying within his chest. Small mercies; he was successful this time, and he brought up nothing but the dryness of unconsciousness. His tongue darted out to probe at his cracked lower lip. Slowly, cool glass met his lips, a hand supporting his head upright, and a thin trickle of water moistened the parched cavern of his mouth.
People often said that one did not know the euphoria of satiation until one suffered endlessly from thirst and hunger. Jiang Xi often scoffed at the phrase, but in this moment, he wondered if perhaps there was some truth in it.
He lay back down, willing himself not to choke.
This time, he was not as successful. The coughs shook the entire bed. He curled into himself, turned himself to one side, and pressed one hand against his mouth, the other to his chest. He wondered if he could break a rib like this, puncture a lung, and in between one breath and another, Jiang Xi heard more than felt the rustle of skin against his hospital gown—no longer the disposable one of the operating theater, but the other kind. The kind he had hoped never to have to wear.
Warmth surrounded him. The hospital bed was narrow, the mattress dipping only a little as Jiang Xi found himself a new bed partner. “Shh,” he heard, and was drawn against a warm, sturdy chest. Hand rubbing his back, smoothing out the wrinkle in the cheap fabric as if it wanted to smooth out his ragged breathing. “Do you want more water?”
He shook his head. The coughing fit subsided, and he sagged against the warmth, unable to breathe. At least this time, he did not taste the tell-tale tang rising in the back of his throat.
That would have been too much humiliation to take in one day.
“What did you mean by good?” The voice asked when it was clear he would no longer choke to death, gentle amusement wavering on the edge of something more dangerous. Like the edge of a knife tilted in one’s hand, catching the light, catching tears. Jiang Xi refused to open his eyes, knowing already what he would find. The white ceiling of a hospital room. The dull, filtered light streaming from behind utilitarian blinds, casting the figure next to him in bright relief, a classical statue carved of marble and gilded in gold. The machinery around them both, noisy and brutal in their automation, recording each of his heartbeat, demanding his blood to give up its secret, measuring all the things that Jiang Xi knew were lacking in this traitorous body and laying it out for the world to see.
“High fever burns out infection,” he only said, and turned away from the sound. It withdrew at the same time; they had danced to this song far too many times already, and it was a wonder that his partner had not tired of the same routine. But there was only a hand brushing back the matted hair on his forehead, soft lips against fevered skin, and Jiang Xi hated the way his body arched upward—not too suddenly, not too ardently, but as if a leaf had finally fallen from a branch, slowly drifting to where it understood would be its home.
Comfort. He did not know when this had come to mean comfort.
The silence stretched, and Jiang Xi bathed in it, warmed by its familiarity. “I think you cost the residents five years of their lives when you collapsed,” Mei Hanxue finally said, and Jiang Xi cracked an eye open at last. He turned around. True to his prediction, Mei Hanxue’s lips were curled in that familiar smile, more radiant than the midday sun and far more grating. His hair was tied back, a golden pool on the hospital pillow, setting his face as one of those gold frames Jiang Xi often saw at museums surrounding the artwork that old masters had painstakingly pored over under candlelight fragrant with the scent of animal fat, under ancient sunlight that burned just as brightly then as it did now.
A ridiculous thought. Jiang Xi pulled back, powerless to do anything more, and only earned another chuckle from that damnable man. And then, more quietly, with his palm against a cool mouth and a fluttering exhalation warming his frozen fingers, “I didn’t know I was your emergency contact.”
“A mistake. I’ll change that.” It was a moment of weakness. He must have been ill already when he made that change in the personnel record. It must have been—
“Don’t.”
Mei Hanxue lifted up his hand, and Jiang Xi traced the IV line that had been inserted into the underside of his wrist, wondering why they had chosen that location instead of the veins on the back of his hand. It only took a moment of incomprehension. The bruises laying atop his hand, so thin he could almost see the hollowness of the bone, had mottled the skin, and it was difficult to find the veins when they had been so abused already in recent months by doctors more optimistic than he, more idiotic than he.
The diagnosis had been swift in the making, slower in the deliverance.
He could have sworn that Shi Mei’s unseeing eyes had glimmered with unshed tears.
How silly. How sentimental.
“I won’t stop working,” Jiang Xi found himself rasping more to himself than to Mei Hanxue. He did not need to convince Mei Hanxue of anything.
That was not their relationship.
“I know,” Mei Hanxue sighed. The smile softened at the edge, a little wistful, a little melancholy. Jiang Xi suddenly hated the sight. It was wrong, he thought, and pulled his hand away. Mei Hanxue was quick to squeeze his wrist; breath-light, a quick brush of the thumb against the side of the wrist. A spot that Mei Hanxue had marked as his own. “Don’t. Just give me this. Please.”
“Go home already,” Jiang Xi wearily said, but allowed Mei Hanxue to hold onto his hand again. Mei Hanxue’s fingers were rough, calloused at the tip where the stringed instruments had bitten into his skin in ridges and troughs; he often thought that musicians had chosen to sacrifice something of themselves for the music, and wondered why any of them would ever make the trade. It seemed unequal, somehow, and Jiang Xi could never understand why others threw away their dignity for music of all things. The fans. The screams, the martyrdom of the spirit for mere vibrations in the air.
It was before he had ever listened to Mei Hanxue’s music.
And then, Jiang Xi thought, perhaps he was beginning to see the sense in all that.
“I’m waiting for you to be discharged,” Mei Hanxue said. “Xue Meng called.”
Jiang Xi’s heart stuttered; it had been doing this often, with alarming intensity. “Did you tell him—”
The rush of relief at Mei Hanxue’s slight head shake was immense. He sank into the bed, his head supported entirely by the pillow, his spine protesting the position. Everything ached, even now. Mei Hanxue’s face wavered in and out of focus, and Jiang Xi found, to his mortification, that he had missed the sight.
“You should go first. Who knows when they’ll let me go.”
“You won’t try to strongarm them to discharge you? Order them around to sign your papers? Yell at your son and throw your pen at him?” Mei Hanxue asked skeptically.
He had tried to no avail. His adopted son was a terrifying taskmaster, and as dean of medicine, outranked Jiang Xi in discharge decision making. Even if Jiang Xi paid his salary and had raised the kid since he could only crawl and babble. When he could get out of bed again, he would do… something. Something terrifying. The effort to think up a vengeful plan was too great for him at the moment. “The bed isn’t too uncomfortable,” he said instead.
It was either that or let Mei Hanxue know that he could scarcely lift his head, let alone walk out of this hospital.
He had pushed himself too hard again.
“It’s small,” Mei Hanxue complained. “No room for me to move about.”
“Who said you can sleep in my bed?” Jiang Xi retorted. It was weak, and the threat nowhere to be found. He was suddenly reminded of the way Mei Hanxue had cooed at a green snake behind the aquarium glass on one of their outings, unmindful of the potential venom dripping out of its fangs.
After all, it was behind glass.
And in any case, that particular snake was not known to be deadly, Jiang Xi knew.
“If I happen to fall asleep, and if you happen to fall asleep…”
“I can’t sleep if you keep breathing on my neck,” Jiang Xi snapped.
“Then what about something like this?”
Slowly, achingly, as if he was painful to touch, as if touch was painful for him, Mei Hanxue rotated them so that Jiang Xi’s head was pillowed on Mei Hanxue’s arm, their noses close enough to graze, their lashes close enough that they would brush against each other should they blink.
Jiang Xi held his breath.
He did not think he could afford to blink, for all the riches under his name.
“Acceptable?” In the air, there was music. The whirring of Jiang Xi’s creaky, fevered brain continued, and it took at least five seconds until he realized that what he had thought was music was the staccato sounds of their heartbeats, slightly out of sync, desperately echoing off of each other, holding onto the stuttered cadence for as long as they could.
At one point, they would diverge.
That moment had not yet come.
“Acceptable,” he murmured, and allowed the waves to pull.