Work Text:
After Vein’s death, Xia Fei sees him everywhere he goes.
But to say he sees him would be a lie—Vein’s gone, after all, leaving nothing behind but his coat that he’d dropped off in Xia Fei’s hands the night the incident occurred. The truth is: Bridon’s turned into Vein, and Vein’s turned into Bridon, and Xia Fei’s always in his room staring at Vein’s coat hanging in his closet and wishing that the traffic lights outside along the streets would be any other color than the red found in Vein’s eyes. Because it’s everywhere inside and outside his window—the red, he means.
Xia Fei finds the color blown up over alleyway walls in the shape of graffiti, in the puddles reflecting neon-lit signs bleeding into the water like their pipes burst from a hemorrhage, in his palm when he accidentally nicks himself with an exam sheet on a Tuesday afternoon. He sees it. Always. Smeared against the phone boxes under a rainstorm. His phone’s recording button. Stop signs. The sunset.
(He remembers asking Vein about it once. The red.
“Laoban,” he’d started while tagging along slightly behind Vein after one of his shoots. It was late evening, and the dying sunlight sloped down Vein’s nose bridge to paint him in a rosy, mellow afterglow, blurring all the sharp edges of his teeth and outfit and fuzzing over at the edge of his jaw. Xia Fei almost forgot what he was going to ask the moment Vein stopped humming and turned around to face him because, in that moment, Vein was the softest thing to exist under the sun. “I—Why are you so red? I mean—”
Before he could finish, Vein barked out a laugh that serrated the air and turned the pink sunset on his cheekbone into a vivid crimson found at the end of a lit cigarette. “Are you going to pick a fight with what I wear, now?”
“N-No!” Xia Fei sputtered, hands raised in front of him in surrender. “You know I’d never pick a fight with you. I was just—I was just curious. That’s all.”
“Hm. So many questions from you today, Felix. What’s gotten into you?” The grin slathered all over Vein’s expression told Xia Fei that this was another one of his rounds of teasing, but it didn’t stop his ears from burning. “So much talking. Did you still want something to eat to fill your mouth?”
“Laoban!” Xia Fei whined. “You already know I can’t have more to eat. Don’t be so mean to me. I just wanted to know. You don’t have to answer.”
Vein crossed his arms just as the sun dipped halfway down under the horizon to backlight him in a livid gold that curved over his shoulders. Xia Fei couldn’t find it in himself to reciprocate his gaze, because it was the equivalent of having his ribcage dismantled in broad daylight. There was something about Vein’s eyes under this shade of light that had Xia Fei feeling more vulnerable than being in front of the camera.
“I’ll tell you, then, if you want to know so badly. It’s simple, see: it has the same meaning as your color.”
“My color?”
Vein took a step closer and poked Xia Fei on the forehead, right at his hairline. He tapped it twice before carding his fingers through the other’s hair and tousling it. And it was the same awfully gentle kind of touch that Vein always gave him when he was stressed, when he was exhausted after a long day’s worth of work. His palm was warm against Xia Fei’s head, fingertips skimming over scalp like one would with a dog. “Yes. Your color. Like gold. Like money.”
Xia Fei couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Even under that kind demeanor, his boss was still a boss after all. Who could blame him? “Laoban, what are you trying to say?”
“Come on, sweetie, use your brain.” Vein pushed a finger between his eyes, amusement seeping from behind his words. “You’re an applied physics major. This should be even easier for you to understand.”
“Um,” Xia Fei not-so-helpfully supplied. Vein tapped him over and over again until his hands flew in front of his face to protect it from having a hole bored into it. “Okay, okay! Sto—Stop! I understand, I understand!”
“Oh? You finally do? Then tell me,” Vein mused, retracting his hand. He had that shit-eating grin on his face again, and Xia Fei had no idea how its absence would leave a bite-sized mark in his chest in the future.
“Red… for auspiciousness, right? I mean, you have a lot of businesses, so walking around in all red… helps the money flow? Is that it?” Xia Fei put two and two together, and somehow, though Vein looked satisfied with his answer, he couldn’t help but think there was more to it. But there wasn’t any more to it, because Vein gave him a pat on the back for answering his question successfully and led him down the road.
“Bingo! It’s also a tasty color, like hot pot meat. Like flesh. It’s a color people won’t forget.” Vein slowed to a stop in front of a crosswalk and Xia Fei slowed down with him like a leaf being pulled along a current in this large city. Next to them, the traffic light switched from green to red and crowned the top of Vein’s head with a vermillion so livid it could be mistaken for blood. It didn’t strike Xia Fei then that this was a presage rather than something beautiful that had fallen asleep over Vein’s hair in a veil. “When I leave the room,” Vein continued, turning towards Xia Fei bathed in the same shade as a pulsating heart, “I want them all to remember this red. How lucky they were to have even seen it.”)
Xia Fei remembers. He feels like the only one who remembers Vein, who remembers how his red was the same as the color in Xia Fei’s hands when he pressed them against light.
And, really, actually, the truth is: it’s like Vein’s never left at all. He’s still here. He’s still here, Xia Fei believes, because it’s all he can ever do when things don’t make any sense in a world of hard logic. He believes Vein’s presence to be real: in the edge of his bathroom mirror, behind the third aisle in the convenience store, behind his eyelids when the morning sun wakes him.
So it’s some sort of wicked haunting, some fucked up shit that’s messing with Xia Fei’s mind, but he clings onto Vein’s coat and believes. It’s this belief that will make Vein real again. He knows. It’s all he can know.
Laoban, Xia Fei would think as he stares into the cameras during his photoshoots, their lenses shuttering like eyelids closing against the truth, are you still watching me? The cameras click. The flash is bold, blinding. Vein’s ghost imprints itself behind Xia Fei’s eyes, white as his incisors when he used to bare his teeth into a grin. Laoban, I need you to tell me. Laoban, please. Tell me that you’re still watching. Tell me how to continue. Laoban, please, just tell me—
Sometimes, Xia Fei sits in front of the cameras after his shoots, and waits. Other times, he goes back to his apartment and squeezes his eyes shut in front of his closet and waits for the coat to have a body. There’s a lot of waiting involved. Time doesn’t tell him what he needs to know. Vein doesn’t tell what he needs to know. No one tells him what he needs to know, for that matter. Xia Fei can only sit on the edge of his bed and watch as Vein’s coat chooses silence as its response.
(And, most times, more often than he remembers, when the traffic light outside bleeds an unlucky red past his thin curtains like an open wound, Xia Fei sits on the edge of his bed with Vein’s coat around his shoulders, and pretends that it’s the equivalent of being held.)