Work Text:
Twelve years ago, Hong’er died.
He remembers it like it was yesterday. He remembers because he’s been dreaming about it every night since.
Once, he dreamt of the earthquake. He dreamt of the tsunami. He dreamt of his family, fleeing in a too-small car, leaving him behind.
Now, he dreams of what happened after.
He dreams about the door in the middle of nowhere. He dreams of crossing into a wasteland of stars, the universe pressing in from every side, infinite and crushing. He dreams of being cold—so cold—dragging his feet through the snow.
He dreams of the man with the bamboo hat.
In the dream, the man picks him up, or maybe catches him. He holds Hong’er close and warms up his shivering frame, cradling him with steps like a dance.
In the dream, he gives him a chair.
If you can’t find a reason to live, the man says, voice echoing over and over, then live for me.
Hong’er looks up at the gege in white—a sword in one hand, a flower in the other—and sometimes he sees his face, kind amber eyes and brown hair as long as a river and lips curved in a smile. Sometimes, he doesn’t. Those times, all he sees is the white hem of a robe.
Twelve years ago, Hong’er died. And, twelve years ago, he was saved.
That’s why, when the gege in white appears on his way to school, under a broad bamboo hat that nearly—nearly—hides him from view, there’s no way he wouldn’t recognize him.
“Excuse me. Do you know if there are any ruins around here?”
Me.
He doesn’t go by Hong’er anymore. These days, people call him Hua Cheng.
After all, Hong’er died. Hua Cheng is what came after. He picked it out from a dictionary: “Hua” for the flower in his savior’s hand; “Cheng” for a place to call home. No man is an island, they say, but Hua Cheng doesn’t have a city anymore, so what can he do but become his own dwelling place?
And, if the hand holding that flower ever needs a place to rest, Hua Cheng will gladly become that, too.
That’s what he thought.
But now the man in white is back, and Hua Cheng is barely seventeen, a nobody, still in school, still powerless.
Still, when his savior disappears into the ruins, Hua Cheng shakes himself out of his reverie.
“Gege,” he calls after him, quietly at first, then louder. “Gege!”
And then he’s running, running, running towards a door.
He fucks up.
Of course he fucks up. Hong’er was a fuck-up—that’s why his family left him behind—and Hua Cheng hasn’t yet broken the habit.
His first mistake was picking up the keystone. He didn’t know it was a keystone—at this moment in time, he still doesn’t—and he won’t realize this fuck-up until it’s far too late.
But he’s made another, bigger mistake, and this one he realizes immediately as he looks out the classroom window, at the billowing smoke in the form of a giant worm in the sky.
Leave.
“Where are you going?” Mu Qing yells after him.
“The fuck?!” Feng Xin joins him.
Hua Cheng doesn’t turn back, only clicks his tongue and glares. He wouldn’t call them friends—Hua Cheng doesn’t have friends—but they annoy him more than they annoy other people, and he annoys them back, and sometimes, they’ll do his calligraphy homework in exchange for a hand in math or literature, and this suits him just fine.
They don’t chase him outside. This suits him just fine, too.
“You!” the man in the bamboo hat bristles, seeing him run into the eye of the storm. He’s trying to close the door, but the smoke’s too strong. He keeps yelling at him to leave.
But Hua Cheng won’t make that mistake thrice.
(In hindsight, fate’s a cruel mistress.)
His savior’s name is Xie Lian.
It’s a beautiful name, Hua Cheng thinks. It’s a name you can’t call without smiling, lips curving twice around upward sounds.
“How about you?” Xie Lian asks, peering up at him from the ground. “What’s your name?”
And Hua Cheng’s about to tell him, even though he knows no sane mind would make the leap from the words to their true meaning; or even an insane, convoluted mind like Mu Qing’s—
And then, Xie Lian’s eyes zero in on the nametag on his uniform. “Ah, San Lang.”
It’s a borrowed one. Stolen, actually, from the last boy to “graduate” from the orphanage. He hasn’t had time yet to sew his own name on.
But it sounds so sweet on those lips—a name you can’t speak without kissing—and so, on a whim, Hua Cheng says: “That’s right. Does gege like it?”
Xie Lian’s smile is blinding. “It sounds just like you.”
Third son. Darling. “Thanks,” he says, grinning cheekily around the knowledge that only the wrong one’s true, and the right one’s a utopia. “I think so too.”
The cat-fox-whatever is back.
It’s a rugged, dirty white thing. Hua Cheng doesn’t like it one bit—white is gege’s color, no one else should even try to usurp it—but it seems that, for some reason, the creature likes him.
And absolutely loathes Xie Lian.
(He doesn’t, Hua Cheng will learn only after much, much heartbreak. It’s just that it’s miserable, and misery enjoys company, and what better company for a deity than the man Hua Cheng built up into a god?)
“Ah—San Lang? I might… need some help…”
So it turns his god into a chair.
A chair.
The chair’s important, Hua Cheng thinks. It must’ve meant quite a lot to him. A gift from someone, long before it was a gift from Xie Lian.
Right?
Try as he might, he can’t remember who.
They end up in Taiwan.
It’s a long way by sea, and an even longer way by land once they’re actually there, running around in circles while the shitty cat named Bai Wuxiang knocks open door after door after door.
On the floor of the Ferris wheel cabin, Hua Cheng asks: “Why are you a Closer?”
He’s aware the wording is particular. Not ‘When did you become a Closer’. Not ‘Have you always been a Closer’. Why. Three characters and a question mark.
The images from the Ever-After are still pulsing at the forefront of his mind. He desperately wants to think of anything else.
In his chair form, Xie Lian doesn’t have facial features—unless you count the twin indents in the back, looking just a bit like eyes. So Hua Cheng can’t tell what kind of face he’s making. But, in a way, he suspects.
Because, when Xie Lian finally speaks, his voice sounds like Bai Wuxiang looks: half-smiling, half-crying. “I lost someone,” he confesses. “Beyond a door. Someone very dear to me. And then I lost my memories, too.”
Someone very dear to me. For some reason, Hua Cheng’s heart constricts. “Can the Ever-After do that?” he asks, ignoring the knife in his chest, because that pain is unnecessary and because his god has been hurt. Robbed. That’s what matters, not a child’s silly dream of being loved back. “Take memories?”
Chair-gege moves in a way that could be a shake of the head. “The Ever-After exists behind locked doors. The same way, memories exist beyond open ones. It’s when that order’s upset—doors opening where they shouldn’t, closing where they shouldn’t—that the balance shatters. Worms break free, and memories are locked away.”
“So you could get them back?” Hua Cheng hears himself ask, stupid with hope. It’s the most self-harming wish he’s ever had: for his god to be made whole again. But another, uglier part of him is already begging for a different answer.
Xie Lian leans into him. Whether it’s intentional or a by-product of the missing leg, Hua Cheng does not know. “With the right key,” his god whispers, “anything is possible.”
Later, Hua Cheng will curse those words until he’s screamed himself raw.
Xie Lian is the keystone.
With the right key, anything is possible.
Xie Lian is the key, and he’s begging Hua Cheng to use him.
This is all wrong. This is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Because Xie Lian was supposed to get his memories back. He was supposed to remember who he was; what his dearest person looked like. He was supposed to find the key.
He was not supposed to become one.
And Hua Cheng wants to scream, scream, scream, because how is this fair? How is this fate?
He wants to reject it all. He wants to let everybody die. He wants to take Xie Lian away, three-legged and broken, and tuck him far away from everyone and everything: keystones, doors, death.
Xie Lian, who had a dream. Xie Lian, who had a purpose and a life and didn’t always feel like he was living somebody else’s like the fake nobody holding him. Eating someone else’s food, sleeping in someone else’s room, wearing someone else’s name.
Xie Lian was supposed to leave him behind.
With the right key, anything is possible.
He was not supposed to leave Xie Lian behind.
He nearly kills Bai Wuxiang.
He has him by the throat. His little body’s lifted above Hua Cheng’s head. He’d never die from such a small thing, one good throw across a room, but Hua Cheng could try. Oh, he could try.
But in the end, he doesn’t.
“Leave,” he says coldly to the cat who is not a cat, the god who is not his god. “I never want to hear a word from you again.”
Bai Wuxiang deflates. His half-smiling, half-crying face cracks right through the middle. One half falls away, shattering, and Hua Cheng doesn’t stay to check which.
Instead, he marches back, readying himself for war.
With the right key, anything is possible.
Hua Cheng is stupid. He’s an idiot, the worst idiot who’s ever lived. He has no idea why it took him so long to figure it out.
Maybe it’s that he never thought he could be right for anything.
He enlists help. He-fucking-Xuan of all people, Xie Lian’s asshole roommate. A stranger friendship, Hua Cheng has never seen.
But He Xuan helps him. Takes him where he needs to go.
On the highway, they are ghosts. They speed into empty roads, under an empty sky, never speaking a single word.
This suits him just fine, too.
In the car, he dreams. He dreams of snow and a door, of a bamboo hat and a white robe. He dreams of a flower, a sword, a chair.
There’s something wrong with this picture, but he cannot for the life of him figure out what.
He’s at the door in the middle of nowhere. Crossing into a wasteland of stars, the universe pressing in from every side, infinite and crushing. He isn’t cold—not anymore—and there isn’t any snow.
But the man in the bamboo hat is still there, trapped in a tiny chair.
The last time he was here, that man picked him up. Or maybe he caught him, caught him from down below, softening the fall that should’ve killed him. He held him close and warmed up his shivering frame, cradling him with steps like a dance.
Was it really the cold that made him shiver?
Hua Cheng clutches his head. Memories are flooding it, memories he doesn’t understand, memories that don’t match. Broken pieces of a puzzle, a mosaic on jagged edges, and none of them fit against each other.
He’s falling. He’s stumbling. He’s drowning in the snow and drowning in saltwater, splintering in a thousand shards, splitting apart. Bursting into butterflies.
…Wait.
Butterflies?
Hua Cheng always liked butterflies.
He liked them back when he was still Hong’er. In the orphanage, they often flitted in from the crack in his window, fluttering in the morning light. In a way, they’ve been his only companions.
He never thought the butterflies might like him back.
But now, as they swarm under his feet and carry him at the top of the mountain, rushing towards the frozen keystone holding up the world, a broken Atlas—
Now, it feels like it’s happened before.
Hua Cheng reaches Xie Lian. He frees him. He dooms everybody else’s world and saves his.
But he knew Xie Lian wouldn’t have it.
Xie Lian was good, kind. He saved Hong’er when nobody else would, saved Hua Cheng again after he yanked a malicious god from the earth and set him loose by mistake. Mistakes—that was the only constant of his life, as Hong’er or Hua Cheng or even San Lang.
Mistakes, and Xie Lian.
“Your Highness.”
He doesn’t know where the words come from. Right here, right now, Hua Cheng has never been more uncertain about who he is.
But he’s certain about this.
Xie Lian’s curse travels through touch, so Hua Cheng draws him close. With his last breath, he wants to be selfish.
So he cradles Xie Lian’s head, pulls him in, and kisses.
He kisses at the corner of his eyes—one, then the other. He kisses the tears away, following their trail down his cheeks. Then he brings that salt to his god’s lips.
Xie Lian opens under him. He opens like a flower, petals unfurling, spilling morning dew. He’s still crying. Hua Cheng soothes him—it’s okay, it’s going to be okay, it’s almost over—but his savior won’t be soothed; instead he clings, desperately, fists tight in Hua Cheng’s shirt, like the thought of losing this nameless nobody is unbearable.
Selfishly, Hua Cheng is grateful.
But then Xie Lian breaks from his lips and sobs, forehead pressed against his. “Not again,” he breathes, looking every bit as confused as Hua Cheng feels. Like the universe is crowding in his mind and he can no longer tell what’s real. “San Lang, I can’t lose you again.”
When have you lost me? Hua Cheng wants to ask, but can’t. Because it’s a second: from the spot their foreheads meet, light bursts, blinding.
And then the memories flood back.
Doors.
He remembers them appearing everywhere. He remembers the other officials pestering Xie Lian to take care of it—because Heavens forbid gods can actually look after themselves for five seconds—and Xie Lian agreeing.
He remembers going in first, just to check.
He doesn’t remember anything after that.
But he remembers the before: a fall, a prince, a smile. A sword and a flower and steps like a dance. He remembers the war.
He remembers what came after.
They wake up tangled in the snow. The sky has cleared; the worm is gone.
Set in the mountain peak, Bai Wuxiang looks at him with unseeing eyes—one smiling, one crying—craved upon the stone.
“Your Highness.”
Xie Lian stirs. He hasn’t come to yet, but he’s breathing, and that lets Hua Cheng breathes too. Even if it’s been a long time since he’s needed to.
After all, now he remembers.
“San Lang…?”
Hua Cheng gathers him close. “I’m here,” he murmurs into his husband’s hair. “I’m sorry. I never meant to leave.”
The doors—they led to other worlds. Other realities. When they sensed an intruder, they tried to make them fit. Who knows whose life Hua Cheng has been living? Whose reality he’s usurped?
No wonder, he thinks, that he couldn’t remember who the chair belonged to.
In his arms, Xie Lian is a mess. He’s crying and latching onto him, a newborn born anew. “Never do that again.”
“I won’t.”
“I mean it. I’ll get a divorce.”
“Your Highness, I promise you—”
“And don’t walk into strange doors if you don’t know where they lead!” he bursts out.
Hua Cheng takes the scolding. He’d hang his head in shame, but it’s hard to feel any. If he had to step into the unknown so Xie Lian could come in to find it familiar, he’d do it again in a heartbeat.
It seems that no matter which life he’s living, Hua Cheng will always be selfish.
After a while, he hums: “Gege.”
“Mm?”
“Do you want to go home?”
For a second, it looks like Xie Lian’s going to blow up at him again: lip quivering, hands trembling—oh, no. He’s made him cry again, hasn’t he?
But then, just as he’s about to apologize: “Yes,” Xie Lian breathes at last. “More than anything.”
“Alright.”
Hua Cheng stands. He offers Xie Lian his hand, then sweeps the snowscape with his eyes to find what he’s looking for.
At his feet, a chair.
In the distance, a boy.
Hua Cheng’s outer robe is in tatters. Xie Lian seems to notice and instantly think: Absolutely not. Before he can protest, he’s been wrapped up in a white, flowy outer robe. On his San Lang frame, it reaches down to his ankles.
He goes to the boy and gives him the chair.
In front of his eyes, the spell breaks. The boy changes into a little girl. Is it your life I’ve been stealing? Hua Cheng wonders. No matter. The doors will make it right again.
So he turns, takes his husband’s hand, and leads him on the long walk home.
Outtake
“San Lang,” Xie Lian pipes up after a while.
“Mm?”
“Was I really Black Water’s roommate?”
A burst of laughter. “I couldn’t believe it either. Gege really is the most patient person in the whole world.”
“Haha,” Xie Lian chuckles awkwardly. “He’s definitely been just as patient. I’ll have to thank him later.”
Hua Cheng blinks. “Thank him?”
“Yeah,” Xie Lian says. “San Lang, that wasn’t an illusion. Everyone really came to help. Black Water, Shi Qingxuan, the State Preceptor… even Jun Wu,” he says. “Though I wonder where they ended up.”
The smile on Hua Cheng’s face freezes. “Sorry, who?”
“Mu Qing and Feng Xin.”
For the rest of the way home, Hua Cheng silently plots two murders.