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The hum of the airplane engine is a low, vibrating roar that rattles the marrow of my bones, but inside my chest, the silence is absolute. It is a dead, heavy quiet.
Beside me, the cabin lights have been dimmed for the long flight across continents, casting the narrow rows in a cold, artificial twilight. Everyone around us is asleep, suspended in mid-air between a home left behind and a destination yet unknown. But I cannot sleep. I will never sleep again. To close my eyes is to invite the ghosts back into the room, and I have already buried too many of them.
A sudden, heavy weight sinks against my right side, cutting through the frost of my thoughts.
Cheng Xiaoshi’s head drops onto my shoulder. His breathing slumps down, smoothing out into a soft, rhythmic cadence that catches against the fabric of my sweater. He shifts, muttering something incoherent under his breath, before burying his face deeper into the crook of my neck. He is seeking warmth. He is seeking a stability he assumes I possess.
The heat of his skin bleeds straight through the layers of our clothes, burning against my collarbone. It is a grounding, agonizing presence. I freeze, holding my breath for a handful of seconds, terrified that even the rise and fall of my own chest might disturb the fragile peace he has found.
How long has it been?
I ask the darkness, but the cabin walls offer no answers. How many timelines has it been since the day I lost my sun?
I try to count, to trace the lineage of my failures backward through the dark, but my mind refuses to yield a number. The digits dissolved a lifetime ago, washed away by the sheer volume of blood I have had to scrub from my memories. Was it thirty? Eighty? A hundred? The dates have completely eroded, crushed under the weight of the same recurring nightmare.
Every single time the node approaches, I convince myself that this iteration will be different. I tell myself that I have moved the chess pieces perfectly. I alter a conversation here; I delay a footsteps there. I build a fortress out of calculated seconds and stolen minutes, convinced I have finally outsmarted the universe.
And every single time, fate finds a new crack in the wall.
The circumstances shift with a sickening, playful cruelty. A knife in a dim alleyway. A bullet through a shattered window. A choked gasp in a locked room while I scream his name from the other side of an unbreakable door. The methods change, but the horrific finale remains a structural constant. I am always forced to witness the terrifying, agonizing transfer of his power. The dive, the ripples, the absolute command over the camera—it tears itself out of his fracturing body and violently slams into mine, a tidal wave of lightning and grief that floods my veins.
I am always forced to feel the phantom weight of his soul leaving his skin as his heart gives its final, erratic stutter against my palms.
"Save them all," he always whispers. It is always his final breath. A beautiful, selfless command from a boy who never learned how to be selfish.
And then, the world goes completely monochrome.
People who have never lived through a broken timeline do not understand what a monochrome hell truly is. It isn’t merely a lack of color. It is a physical, suffocating vacuum where oxygen has no weight and time has no meaning. Without my sun, I am nothing but a shadow cast by a dead star. I am an empty shell walking through a graveyard of realities, suffocating on the gray ash of a world that dared to keep spinning after his heart stopped.
So, I turn back. Every single time.
I look at the photograph. I raise my hand. I strike the glass. I violently re-erase the moment of his expiration, uncaring of the structural damage I am doing to the universe. I want my Cheng back. I need him to live. I need to hear his loud, obnoxious laugh. I need to see the amber fire in his eyes.
I know I am breaking our rule. I know I am tearing down our vow. “No matter the past, regardless of the future, do not change the timeline.” It was the golden promise of the Time Photo Studio. It was the anchor we forged together to keep ourselves from drowning in the downstream of history.
But I have to break it. I will break it a thousand times more. Because the universe did not love him, but I do. I can never, ever let him go. I will never let him go.
Even if I am condemned to see his blood spilled across the floor over and over again. Even if I must carry the agonizing symphony of his dying words in my ears for eternity, I will save him. Let the timeline fracture at the seams. Let reality bleed out until there is nothing left but chaos. I will drag him out of the dark, kicking and screaming, because a world without Cheng Xiaoshi is a world that has no right to exist.
I love this man.
I love him with a desperate, starving intensity that teeters precariously on the absolute edge of sanity. I love him the way a dying man clings to his final breath. Cheng Xiaoshi is the wine that I am completely, utterly intoxicated in. He is a sweet, dizzying poison in my blood, and I am so deeply drunk on his existence that I can no longer distinguish where my own survival ends and his begins. He is the warmth that keeps my own stagnant heart beating.
Carefully, with a slowness that feels like a confession, I lean my head back against the headrest, letting my cheek rest against the soft, dark crown of his hair.
He has no idea. He is completely oblivious, dreaming of a city across the ocean. He thinks we are flying into Bridon to play detective, to chase down old photographs and find clues about his missing parents. He doesn't know that this entire itinerary—every ticket, every hotel reservation, every calculated step—is a frantic, desperate gambit I have engineered to steer him away from the crosshairs of his next scheduled tragedy. He doesn't know that Bridon is the mouth of the beast, and I am walking into it with my eyes wide open, praying I can change the node before it claims him again.
"Just sleep, Xiaoshi," I murmur into the dark, the words melting into the vibration of the plane.
His chest rises and falls against my arm, a steady, fragile miracle. I will keep watch through the night. I will fight the gods of time with my bare hands if I have to. The universe will eventually grow tired of trying to take him from me, because I will never stop coming back for him.