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"You need to take better care of yourself."
Zhang Hailou traced the long gash on his face with trembling fingers while avoiding looking into the mirror right in front of him.
I won't always be there to do it for you.
He hadn't heard Haixia's unspoken words back then but now they rang within his mind with more clarity than anything he had heard in a long, long time.
Haixia had been so gentle with him back then, he remembered. Cleaning the cut with practiced yet careful movements, making sure to tease him even as he admonished him, distracting him from the burning of the disinfectant.
Disinfectant. Right. He reached out blindly towards the bottle, closed his eyes, and poured it over the wound without flinching. He reveled in the burning sensation and missed it the moment it tapered off from being agonizing to merely painful. He waited until after it had stopped hurting completely before he opened his eyes and forced himself to meet his own gaze in the mirror.
It was as dead and hollow as he was on the inside. He watched like an outsider to his own body as he picked up a clean cotton cloth, doused it in another generous amount of disinfectant, and cleaned up the dirt and blood from within and around the gash.
Haixia had always been so tender while caring for him while he, himself, barely found it in himself to clean up his wounds these days. Haixia had held his head in place carefully, had been deathly afraid of getting some of the disinfectant into Hailou's eyes, scared of his sight being ruined by something that was supposed to help him heal after having survived having a rock slicing his face open. He'd been tracing the outline of the wound with slightly trembling fingers for days, even after it had long started to heal and it was clear that it wouldn't even leave a scar. He had been very happy about that, Hailou remembered.
"I don't want anything to mar your pretty face," Haixia had said in a teasing one. His voice had trembled almost as much as his fingers and afterwards he had pressed a kiss as light as air against the almost healed injury.
Hailou swallowed against the pain the memory evoked and pressed his fingers against the open wound to overlay the emotional pain with the far easier bearable physical one. It immediately started bleeding again and he watched expressionlessly as the blood ran down his face. It almost looked like he was crying blood.
This one would leave a scar, he knew. It hadn't been made by a random piece of rock slicking his face open but by a knife. The attack had been meant to kill him by stabbing him through the eye but his damned reflexes had been too fast and he'd evaded the killing blow by twisting to the side at the very last moment. It also wouldn't be cared for nearly as diligently as the one from years ago. Some cleaning, a bandage, and time would be enough to eventually heal his skin; unlike his soul which was unable to do the same and always would be.
Tears mixed with the blood on his face as the traced the outline of the gash with trembling fingers, trying to summon the ghost of being handled with care and love. He closed his eyes and, just for a moment in time, Hailou allowed himself to pretend.
To pretend that there was another, solid presence just behind him, one arm around his waist to hold him in place and keep him from squirming away. A soft voice whispering "stay still and let me take care of you" right into his ear, just before soft lips pressed a kiss against his temple.
"Never scare me like this again," murmured the ghost of Haixia that had become Hailou's companion during the occasional moments of weakness he allowed himself.
"Never again," Hailou promised tonelessly, his eyes open and teary, facing his empty expression again. He could keep that promise. He wasn't scared of anything anymore; Haixia was gone, unable to feel anything, while Hailou had been left behind by everyone he'd ever loved to somehow survive alone in the ruins of a broken future.