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There are times when Blade dreams of fields of red spider lilies and clear night skies blessed with full moons. Starlight sieves through the flowers and tall grass, illuminating the man lying next to him with hair like an ink spill. It’s silk-soft when he reaches down to wrap a strand of it around his fingers, watching it shine jade green in the dim light.
Sometimes, they’re side by side in silence, soaked in the light of the moon. Their breaths rise and fall with the remainders of exhaustion from their sparring just moments before, a gentle harmony to the night breeze and the quiet hum of insects. The air is warm, humid like a thick quilt, and the sky is a clear indigo blue. It’s the perfect evening to stargaze, but instead, Blade is watching the man next to him.
His eyes trace the shape of his companion’s face, memorizing the curve of a pale cheek and the sharp line of a jaw, black eyelashes casting shadows onto his skin, strokes of ink on bamboo paper. He’s so real that it hurts just to look at him.
Feeling Blade’s stare, the man’s eyes flicker towards him, blue like the bottom of the sea, blue like blood veins hidden beneath a thin layer of skin. A sliver of a smile breaks across his face. He says something like “Yingxing, what are you so lost in thought about?”, or “Is there something on my face, Yingxing?”, but all Blade remembers is a name that was once his and the pain it brings him. The aching hole it leaves behind in the cavern of his ribcage in the shape of a stab wound.
Other times, they’re talking and joking about things that don’t quite make sense, but seeing each other smile starts a chain reaction of joy that escalates and escalates until they’re wrapped up in each other laughing and nearly knocking over the wine jug that they had brought to share.
“Yingxing, careful, careful! We almost spilled the wine!”
Blade steadies the jug with a hand before taking a quick swig from it. The alcohol warms his chest pleasantly, flushes his cheeks and makes his heart race when his companion presses his forehead to his arm in laughter, just above the edge of the coral gold bracer on his forearm. Whatever had started the conversation is left forgotten, left to stew among the flowers, but the little piece of happiness remains. Red petals cling in layers to their clothes, but neither notice nor care. This evening is saved only for the moon.
Moments like this never existed in reality. Their time together was most often characterized by the quiet, but Blade used to imagine how the other man would look if he laughed raucously, laughed hard enough that he teared up, that he would lean against Blade’s side holding his stomach.
In reality, there were only gentle smiles, a slender hand on his arm, a shoulder knocking into his. There is only a soft voice, affection curled between the syllables, that calls out, “Yingxing.”
Intimacy with distance, a tinted glass windowpane letting in bits of light. Nothing more than that.
Blade wakes with a lump in his throat and an ache in his chest, and for a few moments longer, he is still just a young man on the Xianzhou Luofu. For a few short, stifling seconds, there is only a gaping abyss of loss. The feeling of reaching out to the space beside him on the bed and expecting someone else’s warmth but finding the cold expanse of empty sheets instead. Loneliness stars in a leading role as an all-engulfing black hole. In the solitary darkness of his room, there are only his breaths, coming short and harsh in the silence.
Teaching himself how to hate again is a grievous task; there’s time that must be taken to forget the way someone’s hands felt. If he no longer remembers, he will no longer yearn for it the way he once did when his hair was still white as stardust.
Fond memories are seared away, and compensated with a vengeance that burns as a wildfire in his veins, flames that turn fields of flowers to ash until there is nothing left but a graveyard for buried emotions. There is nothing left but revenge and the bitter aftertaste it leaves behind in his mouth, like wine left to spoil in an opened flask.
All that remains is the sensation of a starlit spear, as cold and unfeeling as jade, driving into his chest until scarlet blood blooms as a red spider lily.
When Blade teaches himself how to hate, he unlearns love in the shape of soft blue eyes haloed by moonlight.