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Jiang Cheng drops the kids off, drives home, and throws up in the neighbor’s bushes before telling Lan Wangji to drive him to the hospital.
It’s a bit of a blur after that.
It goes like this: his stomach hurts for two days and he thinks it’s fine even though he has no appetite and can’t shit and the room spins whenever he stands up. He would think it’s his appendix if it wasn’t removed four years ago and if the pain wasn’t on the left side.
He waves to the children and thinks, as he drives back, that he has no business being on the road in this state. In his defense, it’s going to be a cold day in hell if he asks Lan Wangji for help without confirming that it’s absolutely necessary. No matter that they live together and help each other all the time. It’s the principle of the thing. If he doesn’t ask for help, then nothing’s wrong. Still, hell feels a little chilly today.
“Wangji,” he says, calling from his car, not bothering—never bothering—with pleasantries. “You’re taking me to the hospital.”
He parks, throws up, and watches Lan Wangji take his seat. He doesn’t offer help, and Jiang Cheng would not accept it.
“You ran over the tulips,” Lan Wangji says.
Jiang Cheng gets in the passenger seat and doesn’t respond. I saw a rabbit and wasn’t about to kill it is too much. He closes his eyes and leans his seat as far back as it will go. Sitting hurts, lying down hurts; he presses a hand to his side and pushes, and it hurts more. Or maybe it doesn’t. He can’t feel much else anymore.
“Stay awake,” Lan Wangji says.
He was waiting in the driveway, so he probably saw the rabbit incident. Stupid Lan Wangji and his stupid rabbits. They have six at home, isn’t that enough?
They were meant to teach the kids responsibility, and they are, but all too often Jiang Cheng comes home to see Lan Wangji in the indoor hutch, out of his wheelchair and sitting against the wall, overfed, lop-eared rabbits jumping over his legs and demanding cuddles.
“What is it?” Lan Wangji asks.
Jiang Cheng scowls at him. Shakes his head. If he opens his mouth he’ll scream. He grits his teeth and breathes.
He doesn’t know what it is—hence the hospital. Hence the… everything. Lan Wangji handed him a water bottle when he got in the car but after the first sip to clear the taste from his mouth, the thought of drinking makes Jiang Cheng want to throw up again.
He doesn’t know what it is. He doesn’t want to know. He wants to curl up under a rock and never come out. He wants to bash that rock into his stomach and never feel this pain again.
The car accelerates.
Good.
Neither of them are too good at following the speed limit, through Lan Wangji always bitches at him. But now Jiang Cheng can’t even call out his hypocrisy, an insult in itself, and when he turns his head, moving to distract himself, to alleviate the pain, he begins to cry.
He thinks of his brother or his sister, who would have held his hands if they weren’t dead. Thinks of Lan Wangji not holding his hand, even if he didn’t need both of his to drive with the hand controls, and thinks that he must be really far gone if he wants that comfort.
It goes like this: he cries until they arrive, stops when Lan Wangji signals inside and he’s taken out of the car directly onto a stretcher, and stretches his hand out automatically when they take him away.
He’s asked to rate his pain—it would hurt worse if a rhinoceros stabbed him, then stepped on the wound—and told to take off his shirt and exchange it for a scratchy gown. He’s given an IV for dehydration and two vials of his blood are stolen for testing.
Soon after, Lan Wangji arrives.
He fills out the paperwork and glares at a nurse who comes by to steal more blood. Stupid, that they didn’t tell her it was already done. She apologizes. Lan Wangji keeps glaring until a doctor arrives. Jiang Cheng holds his hand and laughs when the doctor suggests appendicitis.
Lan Wangji says something biting. Something like, “If you’d checked his medical record—” and stops a nurse from stealing his blood for the third time.
It’s not his appendix, spleen, or gallbladder. “Ask about my tonsils,” Jiang Cheng says, because those have also already been taken.
Then the pain flares, he screams, and the feeling of Lan Wangji’s hand tightening around his fades away.
He wakes groggy, aching, and warm.
There’s a weight on his legs and against his side, and Lan Wangji is sitting by the bed, reading. He puts the book aside when Jiang Cheng opens his eyes, and offers water.
Jiang Cheng doesn’t say thank you and doesn’t ask what happened?, letting Lan Wangji raise the bed so he can drink and watching the kids sleep.
A-Yuan, covered by his favorite light-blue blanket, is curled up on his legs, clutching a stuffed rabbit in one hand and a book in the other. He’s probably drooling, but he doesn’t have his thumb in his mouth, which is a win.
A-Ling is not so successful. Jiang Cheng inserts one of his own hands between A-Ling’s mouth and hand, drawing it away with a practiced motion. He doesn’t stir, still sleeping, still peaceful, little foot still pressed against Jiang Cheng’s calf, almost tickling. Draped over his own soft blanket is Jiang Cheng’s jacket. He tries not to cry.
The sun is going down and Jiang Cheng is sure that this isn’t his first time waking up.
“They took your ovary,” Lan Wangji says. “Yesterday.”
It’s been over a day, then.
“Stole,” Jiang Cheng says. “Stole my ovary.”
“The left one.” Lan Wangji takes the empty water cup. “You had a cyst, it twisted up, killed the ovary.”
The judgment is unspoken; if Jiang Cheng voiced his pain earlier, he would not have gone into emergency surgery. He knows it happens, knows it’s a risk, yet he still feels—maybe not violated, but a little violated. Betrayed. He got rid of his tits and kept his uterus because of costs, and lost the rest of his organs along the way. His liver, his single kidney—his brother’s; his other organs—gone. He still doesn’t know what a gallbladder, spleen, or appendix do, but now his ovary’s joined the ranks, and he knows what it does. Did. He didn’t—doesn’t—want more children, and every time he bleeds he aches to tear the whole system out and be done with it, and he still has the rest of it, but there’s a nasty taste in his mouth that has nothing to do with sleeping for over a day. Maybe it’s about choice.
“I see your husband has filled you in,” says the doctor, entering, deducing from whatever look Jiang Cheng is making that he knows he’s down yet another organ. “How are you feeling?”
“Quiet,” Lan Wangji says, but the children haven’t stirred.
How long have they been waiting? Did they come before dinner and leave to eat, or did Lan Wangji feed them here?
The doctor’s holding a clipboard and flipping through papers. Jiang Cheng gained a husband when he lost his appendix. Right before surgery. For visitation rights. Neither of them are Christian but the hospital chaplain has legal power, apparently. So Lan Wangji was allowed take both children in to see him, to make medical decisions when Jiang Cheng’s only living relative is in grade school. It didn’t make sense to divorce.
He’s tired.
“Sleep,” Lan Wangji says while the doctor is still talking.
Jiang Cheng went to the hospital when Lan Wangji didn’t go to the funerals, demanding answers. Instead, he found A-Yuan reading to A-Ling, who didn’t know what happened, who wouldn’t know for months, not until he understood words and began to crawl.
Jiang Cheng brought A-Yuan back when A-Ling fell asleep, and saw Lan Wangji in his own hospital accomodation, and couldn’t ask why he didn’t go to the funerals, because it was obvious, because in front of him was a person just as broken as he was, because he despised them both.
Us and hospitals, right? he thinks, while the doctor keeps talking, knowing that Lan Wangji is paying attention. Because he still hurts, somewhere beyond the painkillers and too-light blankets. He misses his ovary, though he never cared for it.
A-Ling kicks his leg and tries to put his thumb in his mouth again.
“No, no,” Jiang Cheng says even though he can’t hear, stopping the movement, fighting back a yawn of his own when A-Ling opens his mouth.
His gaze falls on the doctor when he looks at Lan Wangji, but he’s already walking away, saying “Goodnight” over his shoulder. Left to their own devices, then.
“Sleep,” Lan Wangji says.
We’ll be here when you wake up, Jiang Cheng hears, and he really is tired. Losing an organ will do that.
A-Ling yawns again, in sleep just as loud as he is awake, and Jiang Cheng does, too, and then—sleep.