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When Xiao Yueqing opens her eyes again (again?), she does so slowly. She feels it—the unsticking of her lashes, the drag of her lids over dry eyes, the subtle contracting of the muscles beneath her skin.
It takes her a long time to realize she feels little else.
Beneath her is something soft. Whatever she’s wearing is loose, scratchy, covering her from the neck down to her knees. Her hair is unkempt and stringy, brushed away from her face but too oily at her scalp for her to ignore.
She feels sensations. Touch. She feels the way the harsh fluorescent lights above her burn her corneas. The bite of cold air on her skin.
What she doesn’t feel—at least at first—is the rest of her body.
Blink, blink.
She thinks about her fingers. How they stretch, how they curl. The bones that connect them together, the joints, the muscles, the sinew holding everything in place. She thinks of those muscles tightening, thinks of her fingers twitching in response.
They don’t move.
Blink, blink. Blink, blink.
She thinks of her feet. The pointed arch of her toes she always does when she wakes up in the morning, even knowing it’ll have her calves burning like a motherfucker the instant she goes too far with it.
They don’t move.
Blink, blink, blink.
She thinks of her head—her neck. The curve of her throat as she ducks her chin to rub her nose into her shoulder.
It—she—doesn’t move.
Blinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblinkblink—
“Oh. You’re awake.”
The spell breaks.
Suddenly, Xiao Yueqing feels everything, every muscle seizing like she’s been struck by lightning. Her jaw clenches so hard she swears she hears the telltale crack of a tooth. She’s—spasming, maybe? Like she’s seen in people having seizures. Is this a seizure? She’s never had one before, she’s never so much as gotten chills from the flu, and this is so far beyond shivering she wonders how anyone survives this once, let alone ten, twenty, a hundred times.
At some point it stops. She stops. And she sags against the soft thing she’s lying on, hands fisted around sheets, or a blanket, or whatever it is, her heart—
“Moon. Can you hear me now?”
Xiao Yueqing blinks. Moon turns her head to the right and sees a pretty blonde woman in glasses standing beside her.
Juan-jie. Moon remembers her, obviously. Or—it should be obvious. She knows this woman. She’s spent… a long time with her. Around her. Being… told what to do by her?
Apparently satisfied Moon is paying attention, Juan-jie lowers herself onto a stool and swipes expertly at the tablet she settles in her lap, navigating through text and images that pass by too quickly for Moon to make sense of. She adjusts her glasses with her pointer finger, flicking her eyes up to look at Moon.
“They told me it’s likely you won’t be able to speak for some time,” she says. “That’s fine. You have a lot to catch up on anyway, you’re better off listening while you recover.”
Moon doesn’t know who they are. She also doesn’t know what she’s recovering from. She—doesn’t know a lot, actually, now that she thinks about it. Juan-jie is here, though; she’s telling Moon that she can just listen, she doesn’t have to give her any answers.
That… wrankles. For some reason she can’t put her finger on.
Juan-jie talks.
“As I said, a lot’s happened. We’ve had some unusual developments. I don’t know if you remember, but Lin Ling is a hero now. As himself this time. The Commoner. It’s not the name we would have gone with, but the public’s taken a shine to it and rebranding would be a nightmare at this point. He’s ranked nine, and the Director is—impressed with the results he’s managed to achieve in such a short period as a hero.”
Lin Ling conjures a strange feeling in her. Warmth, like sunlight on her skin. Frustration, prickly and jagged; just trying to get a feel for it hurts in a way she can’t describe. Something else, too. Something like hot sand between her toes, and cold water lapping at her ankles, and a hand reaching towards her, and the scent of ozone in the air—
Juan-jie keeps talking.
“The Hero X Tournament began this morning. Lin Ling is taking part. And so is—“
Juan-jie’s nails tap restlessly against the screen of her tablet. As Moon watches, she shifts to cross her legs, then straightens her glasses again. She looks nervous. Brow furrowed, lips pursed. She’s not looking at Moon, now, her gaze darting around the room—hospital room, Moon’s lagging brain finally supplies—before dropping down to her tablet again. Moon cranes her neck as best she can, struggling to see what it is that has Juan-jie acting so strangely.
Because it is strange. Moon doesn’t know, or remember, much, but she knows this. Juan-jie is a rock. Unflappable, unyielding. Angry, sometimes; annoyed, often. But never anxious. Not like this.
It must be pretty bad to get this kind of reaction. I almost wish I could laugh.
The urge to laugh is ridiculous. Probably. With everything else she doesn’t know right now, though, it’s not worth trying to dissect that one.
Clearing her throat, Juan-jie flips the tablet around, offering it up for Moon to see.
“Nice is also competing in the tournament,” she says. Her voice catches on the name. On Nice.
Moon doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t blink.
On the screen is a FOMO post. Pink checkmark next to the user’s handle, so they’re paying for premium and making good use of it with the wall of text they’ve written. Below that is a photo. A screenshot of a livestream judging by the chat box taking up the entire left half of the image. A man with white hair and blue eyes stands rigid slightly off-center, staring blankly ahead. His face is—
She knows him. Nice. Of course she knows him. She hates him. Or… hated him? That face flashes through her mind, but the expression’s all wrong. It’s so much softer, so much sweeter. There’s no judgement in it, no thinly veiled disgust at whatever mess Moon made of the kitchen they shared.
She wanted to be free of him. She wanted him gone.
She cursed him when even death wasn’t enough to sever their ties.
And yet, in this picture, he’s alive. The few words she can glean from that wall of text tells her as much. The post is dated today—this morning, just a few hours ago.
His face is wrong, she thinks. He has a scar that shouldn’t be there. She’s always thought he was like a porcelain doll (has she? Why?), and now it looks as though some precocious child’s had a tantrum with him. Cracking him nearly in two.
Nothing adds up and it hurts trying to make sense of it.
As if she can hear the sudden howling of Moon’s thoughts, Juan-jie tilts her head, her expression… almost softening, if only by degrees. “I don’t know the details. I wasn’t—“ She clicks her tongue. “I wasn’t informed of anything despite still being Nice’s manager on paper. But he’s alive, somehow. And he’s risen to rank ten in a matter of days. Moon,” Juan-jie says, sharp, pointed, and Moon blinks at her, unsure what’s wanted of her. “You need to understand. Nice coming back, it’s called into question Lin Ling’s time as a hero. His time as Nice. That includes your death. Your fake death, and your—your real one.”
That washes over her like the cold ocean waves in her memories, dragging her down, down, down, far away from the shore, where there’s no light and the pressure is suffocating and she’s trapped the way she’s always been but the cage is different it’s worse it’s freezing it’s dark she can’t see she can’t breathe she can’t feel anything—
There’s a hand on her wrist. Firm, warm. Squeezing just shy of painful. Moon drags her gaze to it mechanically, by rote. Then she traces a path from manicured nails up the smooth length of a toned forearm, over a firm bicep, a thin shoulder, an elegant neck. Her eyes linger on the vivid color of Juan-jie’s lips—dark red. Like blood. Swallowing the noise she wants to make, Moon finally lets her eyes lift those last few centimeters to meet Juan-jie’s.
“The public believes Lin Ling is nothing but a con artist now,” Juan-jie tells her gravely. “They think he fooled them all, and that you were in on it. The wedding incident is being outed as the tragic play it was. And now there’s a not-insubstantial number of people who think that means you’re alive.”
Moon blinks.
People who think that means she’s alive.
The question must be plain as day on her face, because Juan-jie’s expression returns to that carefully neutral mask Moon knows she’s seen a thousand times.
“Trust is terrifying,” Juan-jie says. “More so than I think any of us realized. It brought you back, Moon—no, Xiao Yueqing. But it…” Her hand tightens on Moon’s wrist. “We don’t understand it. You’re awake now, but you’re not the same. It’s not just the scarring on your temple—“ Moon didn’t even think to check for scars on herself. Maybe she should have. Maybe she matches Nice again, per their awful fucking contract. “It’s what’s inside, as well.”
There’s a pause, as though giving Moon a moment for this all to sink in. For her to parse through this crazy thing she’s just been told. To come to grips with her new reality—the stolen time she’s occupying.
But this is something she does know for once. Something she’s known since the moment she “woke up.”
Her heart isn’t beating.
“We’ll get you whatever help you need,” Juan-jie promises, and she even sounds somewhat earnest to Moon’s ears. “You’re still contractually a member of Treeman. Death doesn’t actually negate our ability to use your likeness, so I’m pulling strings to get you reinstated as a hero. You’ll have a team of our best doctors to treat you.”
Moon just nods. She can’t speak, anyway, even if she had an inkling of what to say to any of this.
She turns her head again, away from Juan-jie, and the older woman takes it as the dismissal it is. Rising from her seat, she releases her grip on Moon’s wrist.
The warmth fades quickly. Moon barely remembers what it felt like a moment later.
“Get some rest, Xiao Yueqing. I’ll be back to see you tomorrow, hopefully with more information.”
Moon closes her eyes as the door slides open and then closed, the clack of Juan-jie’s heels gradually fading from earshot.
She lies still for a long time. Listening to the beep-beep-beep of the medical equipment surrounding her. Reflexively clenching and unclenching her hands, nails digging half-moons into her palms.
She doesn’t sleep. She wonders, vaguely, if that’s something she even does now. Maybe it doesn’t matter.
What’s the difference, really, when the nightmare doesn’t disappear when she opens her eyes?