Work Text:
The rules, when Lu Guang recites them, are this:
1. You only get 12 hours.
2. Follow my lead and change nothing.
3. Past and future, just let them be.
Most of the time, Cheng Xiaoshi obeys.
Lu Guang doesn’t.
.
The first time is at once the easiest and the hardest.
Cheng Xiaoshi is bleeding out in his arms. Cheng Xiaoshi is gasping out Lu Guang’s name with his last breath, his blood staining the carpet, and Lu Guang’s shirt, and Lu Guang’s hands. It’s thick and sticky as it dries slowly, and all Lu Guang can do is clutch at Cheng Xiaoshi’s jacket in numb terror at his own helplessness.
Cheng Xiaoshi dying feels mostly like nothing. It leaves Lu Guang empty. Numb. It makes him less than a person, an automaton going through motions as he gently lays Cheng Xiaoshi down on the soft carpet, as he folds Cheng Xiaoshi’s hands over his chest. He can’t get rid of the blood, but he makes sure that Cheng Xiaoshi’s hair is slicked back and his eyes closed.
Cheng Xiaoshi doesn’t look peaceful, not really. But he doesn’t look like he’s in pain, either.
Lu Guang gets up. He goes to the front counter. He starts rifling through the photos and film rolls and albums that Cheng Xiaoshi is determined to keep with all the stubbornness of an abandoned child clinging to every single memory, until he finds the one he needs. It’s an old photo, from before he met Cheng Xiaoshi, snapped on his mom’s ancient polaroid camera. A cat, sleeping in the shade of a flowering tree, blurry and almost unrecognizable. Lu Guang’s never been a very good photographer, and it shows.
Cheng Xiaoshi loves— loved that photo. Said it was proof he was better than Lu Guang at their job. Crowed about it, when he carried the rolls in the dark room to be developed, a job Lu Guang has never really taken to.
Lu Guang takes the photo and goes back to Cheng Xiaoshi.
He is still lying on the floor. Of course he is. He is never going to get back up again.
It’s that thought that eventually breaks through Lu Guang’s numbness. That makes him realize why, exactly, he went looking for the photo.
Lu Guang’s breath hitches. His chest hurts, lungs folding and expanding at speed as he draws in every painful breath with sudden crushing knowledge that Cheng Xiaoshi will never breathe again. Will never lock himself in the dark room for hours, developing photos with aching precision. Will never hang around the counter as Lu Guang mans the shop, chattering about something or other, uncaring whether Lu Guang is paying attention to him.
Lu Guang does pay attention. He always pays attention to Cheng Xiaoshi. Couldn’t look away if he tried.
Now, gazing at Cheng Xiaoshi’s corpse, he thinks that he would give anything to be able to look at him, alive and breathing, again.
He clutches the photo in his hand. He gazes at Cheng Xiaoshi, still and cold and so unlike himself, and thinks that he should call the police. He already knows that he won’t, but he should. He should make sure Cheng Xiaoshi’s body is taken care of. He should inform Qiao Ling. He should obey his own rules.
Past and future, just let them be.
Lu Guang does none of that. Instead, with more effort than he has put into anything else in his whole life, he turns away from Cheng Xiaoshi. He climbs up the stairs and goes to their shared bedroom and sits in Cheng Xiaoshi’s chair. He clutches the photo in his hands and looks at it, silent.
The clock ticks to 00:05.
Lu Guang claps his hands.
.
The second time, he’s not in time to hear Cheng Xiaoshi’s last words. The gunshot takes him before Lu Guang can intervene.
Jumping back is, somehow, easier this time.
If Cheng Xiaoshi has to die, he should die in Lu Guang’s arms. It hurts more than anything else in this world, but Cheng Xiaoshi’s last words are for Lu Guang and Lu Guang only.
The least he can do is hear them out.
.
The third time, Cheng Xiaoshi is stabbed to death a mere couple of feet away from Lu Guang, keeping a masked lunatic away from Xu Shanshan. His last words are still Lu Guang’s name.
.
Lu Guang tries everything.
He doesn’t let Cheng Xiaoshi dive into Emma’s life. He looks at the photo, sees the one hour window to retrieve the information that is always the same, no matter the timeline. He looks Cheng Xiaoshi and Qiao Ling in the eye and says, “There’s no chance to find the information. We should refuse the case.”
Cheng Xiaoshi gets shot.
He tries to catch the serial killer before he becomes relevant. He checks the news reports, the security footage, the social media photos. He distracts Cheng Xiaoshi with cases that are utterly unconnected, allows him to make small changes that will not affect the timeline even as he looks for the information that could keep Cheng Xiaoshi alive. In the end, he can’t find anything new, not without Cheng Xiaoshi diving into the photos to look for it personally. The events change from life to life too much, and his memories are not enough.
He doesn’t show Cheng Xiaoshi those photos. Cheng Xiaoshi gets stabbed.
He convinces Cheng Xiaoshi to go traveling during September instead of summer vacation, citing cheaper prices and the lack of sweltering weather. Cheng Xiaoshi agrees and dies in a hit and run in another country, far from home, in Lu Guang’s arms.
He decides not to open the supernatural business with Cheng Xiaoshi, working only as a legitimate photo studio. Cheng Xiaoshi dies in a burglary gone wrong.
His last words are always the same.
Once, and only once, he gets enough strength and courage not to approach Cheng Xiaoshi at all. He doesn’t pass him by on the basketball court, doesn’t walk down the street as he and Qiao Ling paint the storefront. He keeps an eye on Cheng Xiaoshi through social media and an occasional brief glimpse in person. He uses his power on Cheng Xiaoshi’s published photos to make sure his next 12 hours will pass without issues. It’s creepy and it’s wrong, but Lu Guang has crossed all the lines when it comes to Cheng Xiaoshi long ago.
That life, Cheng Xiaoshi is found floating down a river. Lu Guang finds out from a news report, in which Cheng Xiaoshi’s photo is published with his eyes covered. Lu Guang recognizes him immediately. Lu Guang would know him anywhere, at just a glance.
The police can’t tell if it is a suicide or a murder. He died on Emma’s bridge.
Lu Guang looks at the word ‘suicide’ written on his phone screen, and the only thing stopping him from following Cheng Xiaoshi down that river is the fact that he still has unused photos.
He claps.
.
In every life, the first time he sees Cheng Xiaoshi is like a punch to the gut.
He’s radiant, always, laughing in the sun of the basketball court, darting this way and that. His muscles flex with every movement, chest rises and falls with ragged breaths, his skin glistens with sweat.
He is, wholly and unmistakably, alive.
Lu Guang remembers him being stabbed in an alley, bleeding before Lu Guang could reach him. Shot in the head, in the chest, in the stomach. Ran over by a car. Drowned. Beaten to death. Bashed in the head by a baseball bat.
Always, dying in Lu Guang’s arms, Lu Guang’s name on his lips.
But Cheng Xiaoshi is laughing and alive, and he throws a ball in Lu Guang’s direction when he notices him staring.
Lu Guang catches it. Of course he does.
.
Lu Guang snaps a new photo every week.
It doesn’t have to be anything special. A city skyline taken from their bedroom. His breakfast, half-eaten. The neighborhood cat, digging through the trash. Tiny, inconsequential parts of their life, forever saved in Lu Guang’s phone camera. He develops them every couple of months, just in case.
Cheng Xiaoshi, of course, teases him about it.
“You couldn’t have taken a photo of something more interesting?” he grins, cheeky, as he hands Lu Guang the last stack of developed photos. “I was dying from boredom in there.” He motions to the dark room, where Lu Guang is not supposed to enter.
Lu Guang very carefully doesn’t react to the word ‘dying’ coming from Cheng Xiaoshi’s mouth.
“Idiot,” he says instead. “Cats are interesting.”
“I could tell,” Cheng Xiaoshi says. “You’ve got a picture of every cat in the neighborhood on that roll. You must’ve been taking them for weeks.”
Lu Guang has, in fact, taken those photos over the last several months. “Worth it,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate when Cheng Xiaoshi continues teasing, or when Qiao Ling joins in.
It’s better to have them, just in case.
.
Emma always dies when they dive into her picture. Cheng Xiaoshi, no matter how much Lu Guang warns him, can’t stop himself from changing something in her life. If he doesn’t answer the text, he calls, or posts his Moments online. He always finds a way to contact Emma’s parents, and so Emma always dies, again and again and again, like a broken record.
Lu Guang lets him dive in every time, because the one time he didn’t, it was Cheng Xiaoshi who died. So Cheng Xiaoshi dives, and Lu Guang willingly condemns Emma, knowing she will die so that Cheng Xiaoshi might live.
Chen Xiao’s memories always devastate Cheng Xiaoshi. They break him in a way very few of their dives are capable of. There is no changing the death node, no saving a person that is already dead, but Cheng Xiaoshi tries, again and again in every life. Sometimes, he comes back immediately after the earthquake at Lu Guang’s urging, and is devastated that he didn’t witness Chen Xiao’s mother’s last moments. Most of the time, he stays until the very end, and emerges brokenhearted and angry, and shattered in a way that he wasn’t before.
Lu Guang sends him into that memory in every life. After Emma, he is not risking it again.
.
“You know,” says Cheng Xiaoshi, after their twelfth first meeting. “Sometimes I feel like I knew you even before we met.”
Lu Guang’s breath stops short. “How so?” he asks, hopeful that Cheng Xiaoshi might remember. Terrified that Cheng Xiaoshi might know what Lu Guang would do for him.
“I don’t know, just a feeling.” Cheng Xiaoshi rolls around his bunk until he’s looking up at Lu Guang, eyes heavy with sleep. “Deja vu or something like that. I feel like I’ve known you forever.”
Lu Guang is frozen and silent.
“You get me?” Cheng Xiaoshi asks, already drifting to sleep.
“No,” Lu Guang lies. “I don’t.”
.
Lu Guang slips up sometimes. He can’t avoid it, not when he no longer remembers how it feels not to know every facet of Cheng Xiaoshi as a person.
“Here,” he says, in the fourth life, as he slides a cup of coffee in Cheng Xiaoshi’s direction.
“Two sugars!” Cheng Xiaoshi exclaims after taking a sip. “How did you know how I take it?”
“I won’t be letting you drive,” says Lu Guang in their third life, when they rent a car during vacation. “You’re a terrible driver.”
“You can’t know that!” Cheng Xiaoshi says. “I’ve never driven you anywhere in my life.”
“Just don’t come to me for comfort when the movie makes you cry,” Lu Guang warns him, two weeks into their seventh acquaintance.
Cheng Xiaoshi yelps. “I don’t cry at romance movies!” And then, suspiciously, “Did Qiao Ling say something?”
Over and over and over, Lu Guang collects small pieces of Cheng Xiaoshi, little quirks and habits and tastes that no one else in the world knows. Not even Qiao Ling, who used to know him best. But Lu Guang spends lifetimes living in the same house as Cheng Xiaoshi, cooking in the same kitchen, sleeping in the same bedroom. He knows Cheng Xiaoshi better than Cheng Xiaoshi knows himself, and he forgets, sometimes, that the opposite is not the case.
He slips up. It’s normal. It still hurts that Cheng Xiaoshi can’t remember everything that’s happened between them, over years and lifetimes.
Lu Guang is the only one that knows, and if everything goes well, it will stay that way.
.
When Lu Guang gets stabbed and Cheng Xiaoshi remains uninjured, his first thought is, This is not how it should be.
His second thought is, It’s better this way.
Someone needs to die. That’s a fact. That’s a fact that he’s been trying to get around time and time again, and which he can never overcome.
Someone needs to die, and it’s better that it’s him instead of Cheng Xiaoshi. Lu Guang will die here, willingly, happily, as long as Cheng Xiaoshi gets to live. Dying, no matter how painful, is better than the numb, empty feeling of life without Cheng Xiaoshi by Lu Guang’s side. It’s better than the stickiness of Cheng Xiaoshi’s blood on Lu Guang’s hands, better than Cheng Xiaoshi breathing Lu Guang’s name with the last of the air in his lungs. Better than Lu Guang endlessly rifling through his collection of photos, looking for the right one, for the perfect one, for the one that will allow him to fix everything.
He’s going to run out of photos eventually.
So it’s better like this, because Lu Guang gets to die, and Cheng Xiaoshi gets to live. And maybe it’s mean, and selfish and utterly ruthless of him, to subject Cheng Xiaoshi to the pain Lu Guang himself can’t bear, but at least he will be dead and Cheng Xiaoshi alive.
That’s all that matters.
.
Lu Guang wakes up. He lives.
He survives the stabbing, the surgery, his wounds ripping apart. Both he and Cheng Xiaoshi are alive, and he should be happy, because this is the furthest he’s gotten, the longest Cheng Xiaoshi has ever survived. But Lu Guang is also alive, and there was no death to replace Cheng Xiaoshi.
Cheng Xiaoshi still might die, and Lu Guang is flying blind.
So when Lu Guang hears about Cheng Xiaoshi’s kidnapping, he does the same thing he's always done in a situation like this. He snaps a photo of the city skyline and gets up, determined to reach Cheng Xiaoshi as soon as possible. Either to save him, or to hear his dying words.
He places the phone, and the photo, in the towel, to keep them safe.
Just in case.