Chapter Text
Head heavy, Dan Heng rises from a kneeling position. A hand, warm and graceful, caresses his cheek as he stands.
“You have experienced the past and now you experience the future. Use this knowledge wisely, Dan Heng, Imbibitor Lunae.”
The voice is many voices at once.
He hears it in his mind.
“I will,” Dan Heng says solemnly, bowing to the group of Preceptors gathered in front of him.
When Dan Heng reads fiction, he notes that beings always wake from dreams — both pleasant and nightmarish — with gasps and fits as if they’re pulled out of them by force.
Dan Heng wakes from dreams slowly blinking until the archive shelves come into focus above him.
***
When March 7th insists that he perform CPR, Dan Heng drops the man’s wrist where a weak pulse is beating just underneath his fingertips and freezes.
It’s only for a nanosecond, but March 7th notices immediately, sending him a sly and knowing look.
She cannot know.
Dan Heng doesn’t even know himself — unintelligible flashes of breathing life into another swirl behind closed eyelids — so she cannot possibly know.
The young man slumped across the space station floor has a pulse. If Dan Heng has the power to breathe life into another, he won't have to use it here regardless.
As always with March 7th, there’s room for interpretation. She knows far more than her bubbly personality suggests and yet, Dan Heng can easily see her giggly wide-eyed reaction simply being born of the fact that he has to place his lips against another person’s.
His mouth is close enough that Dan Heng can feel a faint but warm breath on his face before March 7th yells for him to stop.
The man — grey hair, waxy skin, he almost looks like a corpse — moves in Dan Heng’s arms.
***
When Dan Heng was initially brought onto the Express, the phonograph machine was Himeko’s pet project. She fixed it quickly, but also abandoned it quickly, caring more about whether she could fix it or not and less about the actual music it could make. This left music selection in the parlour car up to Mister Yang or worse, Pom Pom, with Dan Heng disinterested in it and March 7th somewhat more surprisingly disinterested in it and off doing whatever it is that she does with her free time.
It stays on the same record until one of Pom Pom or Mister Yang decide to change it and Dan Heng learns to tune it out. He’s usually in the archives anyway and the music is faint, if heard at all, through the Express’ thick walls.
Dan Heng isn’t surprised when he comes across Caelus tilting his head to the side like a confused child, poking at the phonograph with the same carelessness that he rummages through trash bins, but he knows how annoyed Himeko will be if she finds out that Caelus has broken it, even accidentally.
“Gently,” Dan Heng tells him. “Like this.”
Reaching over Caelus’ shoulder, Dan Heng lifts the phonograph needle and places it onto the outside edge of the record.
“Thank you!” Caelus says, immediately brightening and smiling up at Dan Heng as if the archivist has done something extraordinary instead of simply playing a record on a phonograph machine.
Caelus’ face never leaves anything to the imagination. It’s why so many of their negotiations go poorly, in addition to Caelus’ general lack of a verbal filter.
“You always know what to do,” the grey-haired man adds with another guileless smile.
Coughing into his hand, Dan Heng realizes that their faces are almost as close to each other as they had been when March 7th had ordered him to perform CPR on Caelus.
“Hardly,” Dan Heng says as he steps back and squares his shoulders.
Caelus shakes his head. Cheeks flushed with colour and eyes shining, Caelus looks like an entirely different person than the lifeless body Dan Heng and March 7 stumbled upon during the Herta Space Station attacks.
I want to see him smiling like that all of the time.
The thought is so startling and sudden that Dan Heng feels as if he’s been struck.
***
When Caelus takes to spending his leisure time in between missions with Dan Heng in the Express archives, Dan Heng is oddly proud.
He ignores the taunts of March 7 — who takes no time at all in reminding Dan Heng of how he had chased her out of the archives repeatedly, stating that if she didn’t have anything to look up, she had no reason to be there — and of Himeko and lets Caelus ask as many questions as he wants.
In many ways, Caelus reminds Dan Heng of himself when he first came onto the Express, albeit more enthusiastic and outwardly inquisitive.
"Would you like to board our Express?”
“We're retracing our previous journey. There's so much to see all over again. We need a guard... And an archiver.”
“You can get off any time once you made up your mind on where to go.”
“Alright,” Dan Heng says, still ungainly in a body that’s his and also somehow wholly unfamiliar to him.
The archives had given Dan Heng an excellent excuse to research and learn about the world at a time when he had felt confused and lost. Caelus displays even more confusion than Dan Heng had felt at that time, but attacks everything with amateurish bombast.
Dan Heng sighs when Caelus leaves files open and takes over all of the monitors and leaves snacks on Dan Heng’s bed and realizes — as he watches Caelus chest rise and fall in sleep — that it’s not pride that he feels when Caelus spends his leisure time in the archives but attraction.
***
When Caelus kisses him suddenly, Dan Heng freezes for more than a moment.
It’s nothing like giving someone CPR.
It’s nothing like breathing life into someone in his dreams.
Caelus’ lips are chapped and his nose is cold as it brushes against Dan Heng’s awkwardly. He moves and sucks on Dan Heng’s lower lip and that’s when Dan Heng finally moves, a low groan rising from his throat.
When Caelus pulls away, there’s no hesitation in his eyes. They shine just as brightly as they did when he managed to solve the mystery of the memetic virus for Asta or managed to find 10,000 credits someone had tossed into a bin on Jarilo-VI.
Dan Heng licks his own dry lips and looks down at Caelus’ mouth, turned up prettily into a surprisingly shy smile, swollen slightly from the kiss.
“Again?” Caelus asks, already leaning in.
Nodding, Dan Heng moves forward.