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How does one deal with grief that is not their own? Poorly and with (attempted) staunch avoidance, in the case of Dan Heng.
Hazy memories invade his dreams—a slightly better alternative to the nightmares where he features as prey—and find themselves sharpest in the mornings.
Dark hair, then white with age. Wisteria moonstone eyes embraced by crow's feet and filled with things like love and pride and fire. Large hands, hot and calloused and so very deft, even when their skin becomes less supple and his knuckles begin to spot. Yingxing is the clearest piece of the scattered memories that belong to Dan Feng, even among the High-Cloud Quintet that he held so dear.
An odd ache accompanies his echo, which Dan Heng can only place when he finally collects all the pieces in his journal. Grief is love without someone to give it to, is something he has heard but never experienced himself. The vestiges of Dan Feng that trail after him like a shadow poison even his own feelings, and Dan Heng wants to curse him.
But he is selfish. More selfish that he wants to look at, or grapple with. Dan Heng's selfishness is just another reminder of the circumstance of his birth.
"Always so stern," Yingxing tells him in something that could be either a dream or a memory. Regardless of where in his mind it comes from, Dan Heng clings to it. He's hungry for the attention, for the affection.
"This High Elder could do with a little bit of loosening up," the man teases him further, sturdy fingers capturing a lock of inky hair and bringing it to his lips for a playful kiss, both fond and irreverent, "How many times do we have to take you out for drinks before you learn to relax?"
Whoever it is that owns this mirage, his mouth opens, "This Furnace Master speaks so fondly of leisure, yet must often be dragged bodily from his forge to enjoy it. I'll eagerly await your own answer to that question."
Yingxing's laugh—rumbling and warm—is a sound that Dan Heng finds himself wishing to record. To have it to keep, tangible and accessible, filed away in the archives as reference for whenever someone wants to learn the sound of happiness. The third time Dan Heng consciously recalls it, he is already uncertain if it has remained unchanged.
Waking, the Vidyadhara's nails curl into his bedsheets like talons, as if it will anchor the dissipating dream and the feelings it brought. Fondness swells in Dan Heng's chest until it overflows, and each drop that sticks in the corners of his eyes stings a little more than the last.
He tosses and turns and stews in his nest, but does not rise to meet the day. Beneath the glass flooring, the water that so often soothes offers little comfort, because this is a homesickness that has no cure. Hiraeth, Dan Heng knows it, but not only can he not return; this home has never been his. Sometimes, it eats him alive.
Why would Dan Feng be so reckless? Why would he seek the forbidden secrets of immortality? Why would he betray the people he so clearly loved?
(Why didn't he get to experience this kind of easy love?)
But Dan Heng has come to know the answer—even when he loathes it, even when it untwists the villain he has made Dan Feng to be in his mind so that distancing himself from those consequences is easier.
Love is the reason.
Dan Feng had so little that belonged solely to himself the way that the High-Cloud Quintet did, and he was destined to outlive all of them. Especially his beloved Yingxing. Why would he not try to take fate into his own hands, for their sakes?
Selfishness is the reason too.
That same selfishness that Dan Heng feels clawing his stomach into ribbons when he thinks about both his family on the Express and the High-Cloud Quintet that he knows vicariously through Dan Feng. He wants it all, even as Dan Heng knows it's so impossibly far out of reach.
Still. What if Caelus or Stelle were to die? What if March 7th was to die? Welt? Himeko? Sunday? Pom-Pom?
Would Dan Heng truly stand by, if he knew he could do something, anything, to save them, even if that thing was forbidden or to drive them away from him? His answer is the same as Dan Feng's, and that makes his recycled skin crawl. He wishes he could hate Dan Feng a little more for this, but it would be nothing but hypocrisy.
Dan Heng can give the first victims of this selfishness no true apology, nor would Dan Feng ever offer one for what he did if he could. His tongue well-twisted for politicking and saccharine for his lover, Dan Heng can imagine he'd offer his apologies to Blade for not being by Yingxing's side, for his pain, rather than for committing Unpardonable Sins and dooming his lover to eternal suffering.
So unworthy, disconnected Dan Heng shoves all of this nonsensical yearning into the cavity of his chest, his ribs like fetters and his heart's tongue sealed to the bottom of its mouth. Not only would no one understand, but no one else should have to bear this burden. Not even he himself should suffer it, but there is no escape for him. The very corpse of the man he yearns for in the same way a rainforest weed reaches for choked-out sunlight will not let him forget it.
Blade chases him like a man possessed, and he may as well be. The only pieces of the Yingxing from cloudy memories that remain are the Roaming Dragon bracer that he still wears around his wrist, and the half of a jade pendant that clings to a belt across his hip. It feels like a mockery of the promise that they stand for, but Dan Heng has no right to make that claim or ache for it. That he even thinks it feels wrong, like another splinter of Dan Feng stuck beneath his skin.
Still, in the worst of ways, Dan Heng knows what Blade's body feels like against his. Solid, towering, running hot like a fever until death's chill creeps over him. The closest Dan Heng has ever come to carnality is when the broken man Dan Feng made dies at the end of a spear crafted by the Disatta's own hands. Those moments feel cruel in too many ways, some of which Dan Heng wishes he could forget—wishes he could root out from the dreams they seep into.
Because when he dreams of Yingxing, pressed over top of a man who could only be Dan Feng, Dan Heng wakes to the phantom of warmth that even his waking mind remembers.
Biting at his lips, keeping his eyes shut tight, Dan Heng rolls over once more and buries his face into his pillows. That ghost of body heat presses against his back now, an immaterial embrace that he can't decide whether to indulge himself in or fight away. It shudders up his spine either way, and Dan Heng chokes down something that would be a sob if it belonged to him.
It's cruel, to taste something so sweet, knowing it's turned so bitter. To find comfort in secondhand memories of a dead man, whose remains want for nothing but their mutual destruction.
From the specter of grief that isn't his own, there is nowhere to run.