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He wakes up on a slightly too stiff mattress and to the humming noise of the air conditioner. Immediately, warning bells ring in his head; he knows he fell asleep in his room in one of his brothers’ many mansions. He knows he fell asleep in a room with fine sheets and a ridiculously expensive bed. He is not where he should be, and that should be horrifying. Every single time when he’s gone to sleep and woken up somewhere else has so far been nothing short of horrible. And even then, knowing this, for some reason his eyes refuse to open and he just turns on his side and hugs the lumpy pillow he apparently has been holding in his sleep. His consciousness is awake and blasting warnings, but his body just apparently isn’t.
Has he been drugged? It wouldn’t be the first time, would it? He had assumed he’d grown sharp enough that nobody would ever be able to slip something in his drink or stick a needle in him when he was asleep, but then how come his body won’t respond? But it’s not the same as being drugged- there’s no tingly sensation, no numbness or dizziness. His body is merely… Not doing what he wants. His body is relaxed and comfortable and at peace even though his mind is screaming this is wrong and he’s in danger.
“Yue, wake up! Aren’t you going to eat breakfast?” a woman’s voice rings through the room (a small room? It has to be a small room, judging by how the voice carries. Someone outside is calling for him- he knows that voice, and his heart tightens and his mind goes blank. He hasn’t heard that voice in years- hasn’t heard it in ten years, to be exact.
He’s dreaming.
That’s the logical conclusion he comes to as his body yawns and stretches its arms, waking up in a relaxed manner that he is entirely unused to. He’s dreaming and he is not in control of his body, and that in and of itself is horrifying: his body is barely his own when he is awake, and now it is entirely taken away from him while he dreams. But contrary to his internal panic, he stifles a yawn, rubs his eyes and swings his legs to the side of the bed. All too calm, all too… Normal. Like a regular teen getting out of bed on a weekend.
“Coming, mom!” it’s unmistakeably his voice that comes out of his throat, but at the same time it’s utterly unrecognizable. Wrong. It’s all wrong, the way he speaks, the words he says- he wants to wake up. He feels like his heart is going to beat out of his chest, and yet his body just shuffles towards the door.
This is… an apartment. A small apartment, somewhere- he’s tempted to say in Hong Kong, but there’s no background noise of cars and people in the streets. There is actually no noise at all other than his footsteps as he opens the door and walks down a small hall like if he’s done this his whole life. This is a dream. This is a stupid dream where he lives in an apartment with his mom. A stupid dream where his mom is alive and she’s calling to him with so much love to come eat breakfast. He doesn’t want to go, he wants to wake up. There’s nothing to be won of living out this stupid scenario, but as much as he tries, he doesn’t awaken. He keeps walking down the hall and into the kitchen.
“Goodmorning, sleepyhead. Did you sleep well?” she’s there. She’s there sitting at the table and Yut Lung feels everything and he feels nothing, because it has been ten years since he saw his mother. The last time he saw her, she was bleeding and screaming and there was nothing he could do. And now she was there, sitting at a small table wearing a shirt and some pants and an apron.
She looks… Just like she did, in his memories. Which is to say, blurry. He doesn’t remember much of his life as a toddler before she was killed: he doesn’t actually remember how it was to be raised by her in those short, few years. Children don’t have great memories. Children who watch their mother get raped and killed probably have even less memories of their past. He can see her: she’s sitting right there, smiling. He knows she’s smiling but he can’t see her face clearly. It’s almost like looking through fogged glass, trying to catch a reflection in rippling water. It feels like if he just focused enough, the image will clear up, that he’ll be able to look at her- how did his mother’s face look? Did she truly look as much as he does as he’s been told? As he remembers? The more he strains his eyes, the more the details seem to fade. He knows she’s smiling, but he can’t seem to focus on her face.
“Mhm. You?” that’s not what he wants to say. He wants to run up to her and hug her, he wants to at least hold her hand- she’s not real, this is a dream and she’s just a collection of his blurry memories, but this is all he has. And yet his body just sits down and reaches for the plate of food she slides his way.
“I did. You know I love the summer- the warmth puts me right to sleep.” she chuckles and brushes a strand of hair off her face. Her hair- it’s long and black and it’s just like his own. He remembers that. He remembers being a little kid and braiding his mom’s hair before she went to sleep. With a clench of his heart, he thinks he recalls her saying she liked summer.
Did she truly get lulled to sleep by the summer warmth, though? He can’t recall her ever saying that, much like he can hardly recall many details of her. Even making small talk, the topics of conversation are either painfully generic or basic. In this dream, his mother does not talk about what she likes and dislikes. She does not talk about her dreams or her ambitions, and she does not talk about her past. This woman- this dream- is a collection of memories and things that Yut Lung has held onto about his mother. The vague memories of things she had said long ago that stuck in his head. The way her voice sounds, ingrained in his mind and never to leave him. Her hair, so much like how he keeps his own now, long and silky. The way she smiles at him. That is all this mother in his dream is- a blurry collection of past memories and nothing more.
This is all he has left of her.
This is all he remembers.
The panic in his heart amplifies, the sense of wrongness making him feel like he’s being crushed. His mother keeps talking but he can’t comprehend her words: it feels like trying to listen to someone underwater, when all that leaves their mouth is bubbles and distorted vibrations. He can’t understand. Did he run out of things for her to talk about? Is this it? Has the dream run out of memories to supply his mother with small talk? It hasn’t been that long. He hasn’t even finished his breakfast. He looks at her, and his eyes burn, but he doesn’t cry. He can’t. In this dream, this Yut Lung who has his mother and lives with her peacefully doesn’t have a reason to cry.
But that isn’t Yut Lung. That is not Yut Lung as much as the blurry collection of memories that sits in front of him is not his mother, as much as this silent and small apartment is not real with its soundless rooms and blurry windows. He’d thought he’d been drugged before, when he woke up- but perhaps this felt even worse. Whenever his brothers drugged him with whatever they had on hand (because of course they wouldn’t measure doses and choose the best suited drug for the job. They weren’t him. They didn’t know and they didn’t care, as long as it knocked out their runt little brother for long enough to let their rich clients get their way), it was physically painful and it inhibited his mind. It all felt melty and slow, made everything around him feel fake and muted. But this sort of dream is different: his body moves on its own, but his mind is entirely working as usual. He still feels panic and dread, feels nauseous and sick. He feels like he should be crying but his eyes are dry. He feels like his hands should be shaking, but instead they just happily continue to hold the utensils. He does not want to keep looking at the blurry approximation of his mother that is all his mind can provide, but his body does it anyways.
He’s starting to forget how she looked. That’s the end of the line and the punch to the gut for him. Because he can suffer and break and build himself back up, can let the pain push him down and then swim back up to repeat it all over again, can be burnt down and remolded from the ashes a thousand times if it means to avenge him and avenge her: but she is dead and gone and nothing remains of her. Yut Lung can kill his brothers and all they love, could bring them back to life just to kill them again, could bathe in their blood and ground their bones to dust and she will still be gone forever. There’s no pictures of her, no traces of the daughter of an impoverished street vendor, or the child concubine of Lee Hong Lung: she was nobody to everyone but him. To him, she was his beloved mother and the only person he had in this world, and then she died and there was nothing other than the memories that have started to blur.
She opens her mouth. He can’t hear her words, nor can he hear what he replies. He’s sat down in a shitty wooden chair but it doesn’t feel like it: it’s starting to feel like he’s laying down in silken bedsheets and a soft mattress. The comfy little kitchen is starting to get hazy, his mother’s silhouette growing blurrier. And his body keeps talking happily, keeps eating and enjoying its morning, but it’s starting to feel less like it’s his own body and more like he’s watching the scene as an outsider. It’s all slipping through his fingers, the quaint little morning with his mother that was never his scenario to enjoy.
He wants to wake up so badly. He needs to leave behind this stupid dream and forget about it and move on, because it’s useless to cry and mope and lick his own wounds forever when he’s supposed to be making sure the chess pieces are advancing as he needs. This is not his mother and this is not his life. But even as the dream melts around him, as the white walls of the apartment seem to sway and fade away, she’s there: his mother, hazy and featureless, but smiling at him. Always smiling at him. He has to wake up, leave this stupid dream.
But he misses his mother.
“Yue,” her voice is so clear. So clear that if he closed his eyes he could pretend it was her, that she was really there and that the dream wasn’t collapsing into itself, that he couldn’t feel the bed underneath him. “Will you be happy for me?”
Yut Lung wakes up breathing heavily and with a pounding headache that makes itself known the second he sits up with a start.
There’s no annoyingly loud air conditioner humming in the background. There are no scratchy sheets and lumpy pillows. There’s the sound of birds coming through his window. He’s laying down in his luxurious bed, covered in expensive sheets. He’s in his room- the room one of his brothers has deemed his, void of personal possessions but at the very least a place to rest (but not one to lower his guard). He’s in his room, in his bed, with a headache and a heartbeat so fast he feels like he might pass out again if it weren’t for the anxiety that would make him worry about throwing up all over himself if it weren’t for his empty stomach.
His hands are shaking as he presses a hand to his chest in a vague attempt to calm his heart, which should be easy- he knows how to do this, knows how to calm himself down, but he just can’t. It’s because he just woke up. Because he’s groggy. He tries to forget the blurred image of his mother sat at the breakfast table- that is not his mother. His mother is dead and nothing remains of her.
On his nightstand, he spots a bottle of champagne- open, almost entirely full, and a half empty flute standing precariously close to the edge of the table. Immediately he recalls getting the bottle for himself last night before going to sleep, and he holds back a groan at the fact he apparently served himself a glass, took some sips and then fell asleep. It would explain why he’s still in his regular clothes rather than pyjamas, and why his hair is down instead of braided. He always puts on pyjamas and braids his hair before going to sleep. Now his hair is without a doubt tangled, and he’ll have to spend a good half hour making sure it’s prim and proper, because if he’s meant to act like a pretty maiden to make sure everything goes his way, he has to put in the effort to take care of his appearance.
It’s been too long since he went to sleep sober. It’s been too long since he had any sort of dream, too- much less a nightmare. Because that was a nightmare, what he dreamt up: there’s no better way to describe it. Because nightmares are scary and that was horrifying, painful, to be stuck in a scenario that could never be, to be faced with the fading memories of the core of his driving force. It’s easy to forget that it’s been ten years since he saw his mother’s face, to forget that he’s forgetting her, when he’s awake. Because he’ll be told he looks so much like her by his brothers with that disgusting smirk, the disgusting you remember what we did to her and know what could happen to you message that always hangs in the air when they’re around. When he’s awake, his mother exists a shadow of himself: he is too busy surviving and making sure that the pains he goes through will be worth it to have to see the way his mother exists merely as a concept for others to taunt him with rather than the memory of a person.
In the dream, there were no brothers looming over him to remind him that he looked so much like the woman they had raped and killed with ease. No gross old men saying that he looks so pretty and young and that he must have taken after his mother. In the dream there was only him and the fragments of what his little child brain managed to cling onto about his mother, a visual reminder that outside of the pain her death caused, so very little of her remains on him.
In the dream, she asked him to be happy for her. What a cruel trick of his own mind to play on him, to have her say that- to put him through such a thing. Yut Lung cannot be happy for anyone. Happiness is not in death and torture and poison, it’s not in living every day anticipating abuse and waiting to be thrown around by adults for their convenience. Happiness is not sitting on fire and enduring the flames to wait for revenge, but it is what Yut Lung has. It’s a stupid question: of course he cannot be happy for her. He cannot be happy even for himself, but he can at least be satisfied once he knows that he has taken everything and killed those who doomed him to such a destiny. He can take all the pain and hurt and all those horrible dark emotions and cultivate them inside of him to give him what he needs to avenge his mother. But he cannot be happy for her- even when all is said and done, he probably never will be able to. He does not need to, and it’s almost laughable to think that some little fragment of his mind would ask such a thing.
Would his mother have asked such a thing? He doesn’t know, of course. He can hardly remember her face outside of the knowledge she looked like him, can’t even remember her favourite color. He remembers the sound of her voice and that she liked summer. He does not know if she would have wanted for him to dedicate his whole life to a bloody revenge. But he thinks it’s ok to let himself be selfish enough to do it: she is dead, after all. What she would have wanted does not matter now. She could have wished for him to never have been born back then, and that would have changed nothing because she was never the one with the power to make choices even when alive.
Yut Lung looks at the full champagne bottle. Such a shame: it’s an expensive brand, sweet and easy on the tongue, and now it’s all gone to waste. It probably wouldn’t spoil just being out for some hours, but it has for sure gone flat. He hadn’t planned on having the whole bottle, because he knows better than to leave himself vulnerable and too hungover the day after, but now the entire bottle will have to be thrown away. It’s been too long since he’s gone to sleep almost entirely sober- the headache he’s dealing with seems to be a tension headache, for once.
It’s also been too long since he’s had any dream this vivid.
He makes a mental note to never let that happen again, and to have his daily wine before bed tonight.