Work Text:
The room is dark in the way only late nights are—not the dark of closed eyes but the living dark of a space breathing quietly around two bodies. The curtains don't quite meet in the middle. A seam of amber streetlight falls across the floor, across the foot of the bed, stops just short of touching them, as though it knows better.
Lu Guang is not asleep.
He hasn’t been asleep for—he doesn’t check his phone. He doesn’t want to know. Time has a way of becoming meaningless when he lies still enough, when he slows his breathing down to match the rhythm of someone else’s, when he is busy memorizing things that should not need to be memorized because they should simply be, should simply continue to be, for a long and unremarkable and blessedly boring number of years.
He is memorizing anyway.
Cheng Xiaoshi’s face, slack with sleep, is three inches from his own. Closer than that. The exhale of his breath comes warm and even against Lu Guang’s face, steady as a tide, and Lu Guang feels every single one of them. Counts them without meaning to. The line of Cheng Xiaoshi’s jaw has gone soft—all that loud, relentless animation stored somewhere deeper for the night, leaving behind just the architecture of him, the raw material that all that noise is built on top of. There is a small crease from the pillowcase pressed into his cheek. His lashes cast shadows that the streetlight can’t quite reach.
He looks—Lu Guang searches for a word and finds only the truest one.
He looks safe.
Lu Guang’s chest does something that is not quite pain and not quite relief and is in fact both of them at once, fused into something without a clear name to it. He exhales through his nose, slow, carefully measured, the way he measures most things. His palm is flat against Cheng Xiaoshi’s sternum. He put it there an hour ago, or two, without really deciding to—just found it there, the way water finds the lowest point, and has not moved it since.
Ba-dum.
A pause.
Ba-dum.
Steady. Unaware of itself. Doing what it has always done, what it will continue to do, what Lu Guang will spend every remaining resource he has making sure it continues to do.
He has felt the absence of this.
He does not let himself think it as anything more elaborate than that, because elaborate is where it gets dangerous, where the images come back in sharp, unwanted resolution—the specific quality of light in a world where this heartbeat had stopped, the way silence can fill a room and keep filling it, past the walls, past the ceiling, into everything he looks at and everything he eats and every time he closes his eyes and finds, again, that there is nothing behind them that he wantsto see. He knows the weight of a world without Cheng Xiaoshi in it. He has held that weight. He knows exactly how it distributes, where it settles, how it compresses the lungs until breathing becomes a mechanical exercise he performs out of sheer tedious biological obligation rather than any real desire to continue.
He will not go back to that.
Ba-dum. Ba-dum.
The heartbeat is so ordinary. So relentlessly, beautifully ordinary. Cheng Xiaoshi has no idea—no idea, at all, that he is the kind of person whose heartbeat can function as an answer to something, as a complete and sufficient rebuttal to every argument despair has ever made. He would probably be embarrassed. He would probably say something deflecting and loud and wave his hand around and refuse to sit still for it. He would make Lu Guang feel briefly insane for the weight of it, and then he would bring Lu Guang something to eat without announcing he was going to do it and act like he hadn’t noticed Lu Guang had been quiet for too long.
Lu Guang knows him. That is the thing. He knows him in the way that accumulates without his permission, that builds up over years of proximity until he can no longer locate the boundary between what I know about you and how I understand the world. He knows the way Cheng Xiaoshi’s voice goes up at the end of questions he’s already sure of the answer to. He knows which silences are actually comfortable and which are the ones where Cheng Xiaoshi is about two minutes from exploding into speech. He knows the specific cadence of his indignation and the specific frequency of his laugh—the real one, the one that happens when something catches him off guard, too quick and genuine to perform.
He knows, in his hands, the weight of Cheng Xiaoshi’s hand in the dark.
He knows what it is to have lost him.
This, he thinks, and presses his palm, just slightly, more firmly against the steady beat beneath it. This is what I am keeping.
Not abstractly. Not as a vow made to the ceiling or to the universe or to whatever causality allows two people to end up here, in this dark, with this much between them. A specific, material, practical commitment of this heartbeat, under this palm. He will stand between it and whatever comes. He has done the math on this—has done it more than once, has done it in the cold objective part of his mind that tries not to flinch—and the math is simple. There is a version of events where Cheng Xiaoshi lives and Lu Guang does not, and there is a version where neither of them does, and there is, if everything holds and Lu Guang is fast enough and careful enough and refuses to be anything less than ruthlessly sufficient—there is a version where Cheng Xiaoshi lives and Lu Guang also gets to go on living.
He wants that version.
But he knows which one he would choose, if choosing became necessary. He made that decision a long time ago in a grief so heavy it had its own gravity, and he has not changed it since. He would choose Cheng Xiaoshi’s continued existence over his own so readily, so resolutely, that it doesn’t even feel like sacrifice—it feels like the only logical answer to an equation he has already solved.
He would do it without hesitation.
He would do it and the last thing he would feel would be something close to relief.
He stares at the crease on Cheng Xiaoshi’s cheek. The slow rise and fall. The particular way his hair falls against the pillow, going in three directions at once the way it always does, the way Lu Guang has never in his life told him he finds—
Cheng Xiaoshi shifts.
It’s small—a tectonic adjustment, some deep-body recalibration from whatever geography he’s inhabiting in his sleep. His brow creases for just a moment, smooths again. One arm moves. Then, without any apparent intervention of consciousness, Cheng Xiaoshi’s hand finds the fabric of Lu Guang’s shirt, curls into it, and pulls.
Lu Guang goes. Of course he goes.
“A’Guang.” The voice is barely language. It is mostly breath and warmth, the smeared edges of consonants spoken by a mouth that is not entirely sure it is awake. “Not sleeping.” A pause that contains a small, vaguely accusatory weight. “Can feel you thinking.”
Something moves through Lu Guang’s chest that he could not name if someone asked him to. He doesn’t speak.
“Sleep,” Cheng Xiaoshi says, with the enormous earnest authority of someone operating on four percent consciousness. His arm completes its motion—comes around Lu Guang fully, pulls him closer, tucks him in against his side with the absolute decisive confidence of a person who has decided this is where things belong and sees no further need for discussion. “C’mere. Sleep.”
And then he is asleep again. Just like that. Between one breath and the next, back under, his chest rising slow and deep, his arm warm and heavy across Lu Guang’s back, his heartbeat unchanged beneath Lu Guang’s palm—
Ba-dum.
Lu Guang closes his eyes.
The feeling that moves through him is too large for his body. It presses against the inside of his ribs, the back of his throat, the corners of his eyes, looking for edges that aren’t there. He breathes. He breathes again. He is aware, in this moment, of so many things simultaneously that it feels, briefly, like the floor has dropped away—the guilt of everything that was his fault and the grief of everything he watched happen and the love that has been accumulating without anywhere to go for long enough that it has become something structural, something he is made of now, not a feeling he has but a fact about his own composition. He is dizzy with it. Undone by the simple weight of an arm. By the slurred, sleepy, downright bossy instruction to come here.
By being pulled closer.
By being—kept.
He thinks about that word. Cheng Xiaoshi, who holds on. Who has always held on—to people, to memories, to the stubborn insistence that the things he loves should be allowed to stay. Lu Guang has watched him grieve things that left. Has watched him go quiet in the specific way he goes quiet when something has been taken from him and he doesn’t know where to put that, doesn’t know what to do with hands that are suddenly empty. Cheng Xiaoshi, who does not ask for much, who would never say it plainly—don’t go, don’t leave, don’t become another thing that I reach for and find missing—but who pulls Lu Guang closer in his sleep like his body knows the truth his waking mouth won’t speak.
Lu Guang feels the arm across his back like a fact. Like a complete sentence.
And something in him goes very still, and very certain, in a way that has nothing to do with the logistics and plans and thoughts from before. Not the calculation of sacrifice. Something older than that, and quieter. If the universe requires something of him—his time, his luck, his careful measured life, every favor that causality has ever owed him—then fine. He will collect on all of it. He will reach into the machinery of the world, into whatever turns the gears of what is allowed to happen and what isn’t, and he will pull, until the outcome has no choice but to be this—Cheng Xiaoshi, warm. Cheng Xiaoshi, here. Cheng Xiaoshi, with somewhere to put his hands that does not become an absence.
He would unwrite the rules of the universe before he let Cheng Xiaoshi reach for him and find nothing.
He breathes. The dizziness ebbs. Leaves behind something quiet and enormous in its place.
I will protect you, he thinks, and it is not the desperate thought from before, not the numb distressed one. It is softer than that. It is said to the arm across his back and the warmth at his side and the steady reliable ba-dum ba-dum against his palm. It is said to the crease on Cheng Xiaoshi’s cheek and the mess of his hair and the sleep-slurred voice that did not even fully wake up before deciding, automatically, no, closer, here.
I will protect you. I will be enough this time. I will find a way to make it work where we both get to stay.
And if I can’t—I will protect you anyway.
I will protect you with everything.
The streetlight seam glows quietly at the foot of the bed. Somewhere distant, something moves—the building settling, or the city turning over in its own half-sleep. Lu Guang lets his eyes close, properly this time, lets the vigilance loosen by one small degree. His fingers stay where they are, flat and still, feeling every beat.
Ba-dum.
Ba-dum.
He sleeps.