Work Text:
Xue Yang often wakes up gasping from dreams he doesn’t remember, barely able to catch his breath as his eyes take in the familiar sight of his bedroom, illuminated by a single stream of moonlight where his curtains aren’t completely closed.
Those dreams he doesn’t remember press onto him like a weighted blanket. They make him feel anxious, these amorphous feelings: fear and longing and anguish and happiness all swirling together like some oppressive cosmic fog.
His dingy apartment brings him little comfort, especially in the dead of winter. He’s too poor to afford to heat it properly, making up for the difference with layers upon layers of clothing instead, so when he gets out of bed, his feet don’t have to meet the cold floor directly. There’s nothing that will get him back to sleep on nights like this, when he’s woken up so relatively early in the night that the moon still shines high in the sky. It’s barely five steps from the bedroom to the kitchen.
He wants something sweet, something from beyond the memory of his waking mind. Nothing he has in his barren kitchen will quite sate the craving, but it’s cold and he ends up letting the warmth of a mug of hot chocolate seep through his fingers. It’s not quite toothsome enough. There’s something missing, but what that might be slips past him like a spirit in white.
The moon is full tonight, framed in his view by the frost curling around the edges of the small kitchen window. He cannot seem to tear his eyes away, overcome by a fearsome longing. With his free hand, he clutches for something that is never there. How often do those four fingers curl around a ghost?
There is dread in the pit of his stomach for the things he has yet to do and the things he has already done. Worse yet, the things he has done and cannot remember, and the aftertaste of longing that lingers behind. He thinks of the dreams he cannot remember, the moon he gazes at so longingly, and the man he’d tortured up until just a few weeks ago, ending only when he’d broken beyond repair, leaving Xue Yang twisted and empty.
What had Xue Yang wanted? What does he want? He longs to reach out to that broken soul, to grasp it in his hands and feel it flutter in his palm. There’s something just out of grasp.
When his cup is empty, he wants more. When others determine him to be unlovable, he wants to prove that he never wanted or needed to be loved. What had he wanted? He’d watched the man’s husband from afar after the funeral. He’d moved like the living dead, eyes glazed over as if he’d departed from this life when his husband had. What had Xue Yang wanted when his fingers itched to ruck up that stranger’s shirt and make a claim, fingers digging into flesh. I own you, he’d thought, without knowing why.
It’s too late, he thinks. He’s been here before, more times than he even realizes. The ache in his bones is familiar, the longing older than his body, but there is little left to anchor him to this world. It is too late.
A cruel life need not make one cruel, he thinks too, although the thought does not feel his own. His cruel life has made him cruel, lashing out like a wounded cat, never thinking of the consequences. At every fork in the road, he had taken the wrong path.
In the dreams he cannot remember, he stands in front of an open door. He cannot see what is on the other side, but he knows what he wants is beyond. Something is holding his ankles, rooting him in place. He cannot take another step, no matter how much he wants to.
In his cold kitchen, there is a poorly-insulated sliding door. On the other side of the door is the balcony jutting out of the building many stories above the ground below. He stands on the balcony in the middle of the night. It’s freezing, but the breeze is gentle. Snow falls on the city spread below him, gathering and piling up. The world moves on. He can too.
He’s standing on the threshold. All he has to do is take one more step.