Chapter Text
Close to fifteen years as a normal, middling child of the modern world—attending school, doing morning calisthenics, receiving red envelopes from indulgent family. Sixteen years miserable, alone and decaying into madness and suffering.
Only eleven years—and four months, three weeks and two days—with Yu Wanyin. With Wang Cuiha.
It wasn’t enough time, no matter what Cen Jintian had said about it being a blessing to know when you will die.
Their children were still small. The youngest would probably never remember him. His Empress was still in the bloom of youth and transcendently beautiful.
So while Wanyin refused to discuss it, Xiahou Dan couldn’t stop himself from wondering, from planning, what he would do if he woke up back in the modern world. The real world.
If Wang Cuiha didn’t exist, he would find a high place and see if there was a next life.
If she did…
He’d thought of countless scenarios. Would he wake up in hospital, a miracle to sobbing parents? Perhaps each year he’d lived only passed as months, or weeks, or days. He might even wake back up in that infernal math classroom.
If he could choose, he’d prefer to wake after a hospital stay. From a coma. Something that could explain him acting like a man used to being obeyed.
He’d killed too many, ruled too long to be fifteen-year-old Zhang San, mediocre student once more.
So when Wanyin’s face, cold and serene as the mountains and rivers over which they’d ruled, began to fade, he smiled.
They had long known this was coming. Her eyes were dry as she waited.
It was her voice that floated along with him as darkness took him, more broken than he’d ever heard it.
“I was blessed to have met you, husband.” A hitching breath. “I’m going to miss you.”
His phone dropped to the floor with a clatter.
There was a frozen moment of silence.
Xiahou Dan stared at ugly, childish scribbles on a mass-produced, printed mathematics textbook in simplified script. He stared at the grey, lifeless desk beneath it.
The corner of his lip twitched into a sardonic smile. There was no pain in this underdeveloped, soft body, but he was acutely familiar with how one acted when suffering the pain of a soul-destroying migraine.
He clutched his head, fingers tearing at his hair—short for the first time in close to three decades. Tensing and bearing down in a way that he knew would burst tiny blood vessels in his face and eyes, he began to slam his head on the desk.
Students panicked, the teacher yelled.
With all the force of a tyrant driven mad by loneliness and pain, with the prospect of yet another set of long, solitary years ahead—Xiahou Dan screamed.
“Name?”
“Zhang San.”
“Date?”
“I… eh. 2016. Spring?”
The paramedics shot each other a quick glance, and the one recording let his pen hover over the paper for a beat too long.
He then promptly started to type something on his phone with his other hand.
“It’s the 27th of October, 2016. Autumn.” They paused briefly to allow Xiahou Dan—Zhang San—to nod.
“Leader’s name?”
“I—I don’t… Hu Jintao!”
Another pause. More typing.
“It is Xi Jinping.”
“Ah.”
When the emergency CT scan finds a spot, and he is rushed for an MRI to diagnose a frontal lobe cavernoma, he is stunned.
He awaits surgery in the neuro-observations unit, using the scent of antiseptic, the strange beeping of machines and the noise of traffic through the window to ground himself.
He’s back.
He has a …tumour, of sorts?
It’s a struggle not to laugh in his mad Emperor way. All those years in Da Xia convinced he had a tumour, only to have been poisoned. It was his real body that had the growth, and in his distant memories, he had never felt a single twinge.
Being back, already missing Wanyin, their children, the sounds of creaking wood and soft steps instead of metal wheels rolling down a sterile corridor, the smell of incense, the polished wood and fine silks in place of fluorescent lighting and soulless plastic… it’s all too much.
When a doctor leads in the parents he hasn’t seen in almost three decades, he can do nothing but stare blankly.
His mother is red faced and crying quietly, tears streaming down her cheeks. His father’s jaw is full of tension and his hands hang in white-knuckled fists at his side. There’s enough Zhang San left in him to think ‘Father’, but Xiahou Dan has no good memories of submitting to parental authority.
Clambering out of the scratchy, clinical sheets, his knees hit the linoleum too hard—this body is far shorter than the one he wore with silk and jade—and his forehead follows, the scent of antiseptic and plastic burning his nostrils, making his too-young voice turn ragged.
“Honoured Father. Honoured Mother. This unfilial son greets you.”
His mother’s composure breaks. Her wail echoes down the corridor. His father’s hands are trembling as he helps him to rise, and Xiahou Dan—Zhang San—sees the tension for what it was—fear, not anger. There’s tears swimming in his father’s eyes.
The eloquent Emperor that Yu Wanyin praised as capable of rousing speeches at the drop of a hat—doesn’t know what to say.
He lets the words of the doctors and his parents wash over him. He needs to learn how to speak like a modern teenager again. He needs to get used to not being the one in charge. For now.
A congenital growth, but now that it’s started to bleed…
…
Once the lesion is completely removed, recurrence is very unlikely. This is not a cancer.
…
Because of the location, there may be changes in personality, behaviour, interests and emotional regulation.
…
Some changes… may… be temporary.
His eyes are dry as he stands by the window, his hands loosely clasped behind him, and waits.