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You weren’t supposed to dream in cryostasis. It was supposed to be like no time passed. And yet, Wei Ying dreamed. Of beautiful things. Mountains and forests and rivers. Lakes full of floating flowers, buildings made of carved wood and decorated with dyed cloth. Music like no music he had ever heard, peaceful and delicate, just the simple sound of strings.
The dreams passed, but the music remained, long after he’d been awakened.
Lan Zhan
The ship shudders and Lan Zhan wakes, wincing in the bright light. His skin itches and his limbs ache and his throat is raw and he’s blinking and blinking and trying to orient himself, trying to remember.
“Doctor Lan,” a smooth voice is saying. A synthetic voice. “You have been woken from cryostasis. Anticipated recovery time is 13 hours. Local time is 14:28, August 27th, 2305. We are 213 years, 4 months, 13 days and 6 hours from estimated arrival.”
Lan Zhan’s eyes open wide and he tries to speak but can only burble.
“Do not speak, Doctor Lan,” the synthetic voice advises. “You must first recover from cryosickness.”
He spends the next thirteen hours staring at the ceiling, trying to understand what’s happening, with such limited information that his mind can only spiral into wild surmise, until the AI finally decides he’s recovered and the restraints that have kept him unmoving are released.
Gingerly, Lan Zhan sits up, testing his limbs.
“Greetings, Dr Lan,” the synthetic voice says.
“Why was I woken up so early?” he asks.
“You were woken from cryostasis following emergency protocol number 729101, as the result of a disharmony in the third aft engine following exposure to an unanticipated magnetic pulse wave, which AI was unable to resolve,” the voice replies smoothly.
Lan Zhan stands, frowning at the weakness in his legs. “Will I be able to return to cryostasis once the matter is resolved?” he asks, even though he already knows the answer.
“This ship does not have the facilities to enter people into cryostasis,” the ship says, as calmly as it says everything.
It takes three days to retune the third aft engine, to sync its vibrations with the other engines until their harmonies sink through the ship like a celestial choir. It always feels like a violation of science, that he tunes more by instinct than by understanding, as if he’s remembering a long-lost song.
Finally, he finishes the work, resets the shields, checks and rechecks the gaskets and casings, and when there’s no more work that can be done he returns to the small quarters he had been assigned, sits down on the bunk, and finally begins considering his existence.
Alone, the only waking body on a vast ship.
He cannot even while away the hours by exploring the ship; he’s already intimately familiar with it. His family had built it, after all. It had been the dream child of his great-great-aunt, Lan Yi, who had looked out her window at the thick smog that filled the streets of Shanghai and dreamed of a world with clear skies.
The dream had become a ship, built by his family, his aunts and uncles and cousins, his parents and brother. And him.
He’d loved it from the first time he’d walked the slick white corridors, artfully lined with curling vines. It wasn’t just a feat of engineering, on the bleeding edge of physics, it was beautiful. It was home.
Just not one he’d been prepared to live in alone.
There isn’t much to do. The last few years before the launch had been hectic, a non-stop panic of barely made deadlines and urgent decision-making. The moment the ship was complete, a bottle of ancient wine broken on its hull, the loading had begun, first the supplies for the colony, then for the time people would be living on the ship- it was to be a home for the colonists while the planet was terraformed, and a space station there after- then the people themselves, shipped aboard already sleeping in their cryotubes, each carefully attached to monitors and placed in its own cradle, stacked on top of each other like bunk beds in the vast holds created for them.
He goes to visit the sleeping passengers, walks through the dim room while machines whirr past, checking on their precious cargo. He finds his brother, face for once without a smile, and his uncle, the wrinkles etched by the stress of the last few years of building smoothed out by sleep.
He turns away from them, makes his way back through the crowded room towards the habitat decks when something makes him turn and peer into the cryotube on his left. A strange whim. An instinct. The person lying in the tube is hard to see, so Lan Zhan lifts the light he always carries with him, and almost gasps as it catches on golden brown skin, a heart shaped face calm in its sleep. The most beautiful person he’s ever seen, certainly. He runs his fingers over the pad on the side of the tube and reads the name. Wei Ying, he/him, engineer, 2nd class.
Wei Ying- Lan Zhan doesn’t recognize the name, but he wonders if he’s met him before. Lan Zhan was in charge of the design and construction of the engines. Perhaps Wei Ying was on his team? No, he would have noticed a man this beautiful. He stares at the smooth skin, at the faint creases around his mouth and eyes. He must smile a lot. Lan Zhan imagines he has a beautiful smile.
Lan Zhan is being foolish. He sighs, lifts his hand from the pad and turns to go, resisting the urge to say farewell to the sleeping man.
He won’t wake up for 213 years. In 213 years, Lan Zhan will be long dead.
He is good. He is mostly good. He has always been good. It’s easy for a while. He hadn’t had time to have hobbies before, had been too busy, first with school, then with working on the ship. It had always been hard for him to convince himself to indulge, to take time off. Now he has all the time in the world, and he tries to remember the things he’d wanted to do before.
The ship has as much of human history as they can store, images of all the art they could get images of, video footage from three centuries worth of television and movies and clips from the internet, an endless archive of the written word. He finds lists and lists of the best novels and non-fiction books and movies and television shows, compilations of video blogs.
Most things he finds he has no taste for- comedic tv shows and popular novels. But he finds some literature fascinating, non-fiction even more so, finds himself sucked into researching one topic after another, that he had been previously ignorant of. The history of rail travel. The biology of jellyfish. How weather systems work. Generational shifts in social media usage.
He learns to make digital art, then he finds his family heirlooms in one of the storage compartments and teaches himself to play the guqin.
The whole time loneliness itches at him. When it gets tos bad, he goes back to the cryotubes, visits his uncle perfunctorily, then spends long hours talking to his dage. And then, though he tells himself he won’t, he visits Wei Ying.
He tells himself he won’t, but when the loneliness aches, he finds himself researching the engineer. Because he was, technically, his superior, he has access to his records. His CV, his supervisor reports. Wei Ying was from Wuhan, had genius-level test scores, had gone to the one of the best universities and finished at the top of his class, then gone on to get his masters.
He shouldn’t have been engineer second class, not with his grades and publication record. But there’s an unexplained gap of several years between undergraduate and graduate school and there must have been something there that had prevented him being offered the position he otherwise deserved.
His supervisor records say as much; he was brilliant, often coming up with unorthodox solutions to problems no one else could solve- he was, in fact, the designer of a number of components Lan Zhan had previously noticed and been impressed by- but he was not good at politics or discretion, his supervisor, who seemed to have taken quite a shine to him, had noted.
Lan Zhan did not like to think that his department had been run in such a way, that a talented engineer had not gotten the recognition he’d deserved because of politics, but he’d not been truly responsible for the governing of the department, having been more responsible for his own design elements than ensuring that the management of the people below him functioned functioned properly.
He considers, briefly, researching better management strategies before he remembers: He won’t be managing anyone. He is alone. For the rest of his life he is alone.
He feels his fists clench until his nails- the ones he keeps long for plucking the guqin strings- dig into his palms and then he takes a deep breath and consciously relaxes them. He gets up and steps away from the console that still displays Wei Ying’s employment record, walks out of the hall and down the corridor until he gets to the central promenade. When the people are awake, it will be a bustling community center, with restaurants and shops, places for people to sit, and courts for playing various games.
But now it is as empty and hollow as Lan Zhan himself. He walks through the promenade and finds himself restlessly rambling through the ship, through corridors reserved for maintenance staff, through the command centers with the unmanned stations for manual control of the ship, until he gets to the viewing deck.
It is not a true viewing deck; true windows are an unjustified risk, but view ports are built into the hull to resemble windows, showing the blackness of space beyond.
This side of the ship is away from the brilliance of the river of stars that marks the center of the galaxy, and so only shows the few distant points of light on the outer rim. They are going almost impossibly fast, are on just this side of breaking the laws of physics. He knows, he’s the one who did the calculations, who designed the engine system, who invented a few novel new techniques to push them just that much faster.
And yet, in the vastness of space, with only those distant stars to break up the darkness, they don’t seem to be moving at all.
Lan Zhan is still and the ship is still and the galaxy is still and the universe is still and of everything only his heart moves.
He stays there until he is swaying from exhaustion and then he turns and goes back to his cabin and lays down on his bed and clears his mind.
He vacillates between states, like an excited electron. Sometimes he is ordered, tidy, regimented, getting up at the same time every day, making his bunk and dressing in clean clothes, following a schedule he made for himself, one composed of regular healthy meals and exercise and a variety of occupations- he is pursuing some novel theories in his field, he is seeing if he can design his engines to go even faster, he is writing music on the guqin, he is trying to learn to read and interpret ancient poetry.
But sometimes he is a sloth, waking and sleeping at any hour he likes, going for days without cleaning himself or changing clothes, eating only one type of food and binge watching or reading or becoming obsessed with some new art project.
Sometimes he is fine with his life, optimistic, interested. Sometimes he thinks that there is no point in continuing when he will always be alone.
He hacks into Wei Ying’s personal files. He shouldn’t, he knows he shouldn’t, but he does anyway.
Wei Ying is an artist. He finds digital painting after digital painting, all done in a modern take on a traditional style. He likes to paint trees and mountains, rabbits and children laughing. He plays the dizi, has been involved in amateur theater at university and in the shipyards, likes to drink.
He finds videos of Wei Ying and his siblings. In them Wei Ying is hugging and kissing his jie, play fighting with his didi. He finds videos of him at his graduation, showing off his colorful tassels, videos of him showing his siblings his new apartment in London, where he got his master’s degree, his tiny bunk at the Mars ship yard, where the ship was built.
Nothing from the three years that were missing from his record.
Lan Zhan watches the videos over and over again, his eyes catching on how his cheeks dimple when he smiles, how his cheeks squish his eyes closed when he’s really happy. He listens to the sound of his voice- there’s a video of him reading a story to some unseen child, one of him singing. When things get really bad, he listens to it on repeat when he’s trying to sleep.
Now when he visits Wei Ying’s sleeping body he can hear his voice in his head, chiding Lan Zhan for his slovenliness, teasing him for the way he can’t help looking at him.
Lan Zhan briefly wonders if he’s developing mental health issues, and then scolds himself. Of course he’s developing mental health issues. Isolation is poison to the human brain. He’ll be lucky if he retains his sanity, in the end.
It is five years, four months, 14 days and 6 hours before another emergency develops, and for the rest of his life Lan Zhan will have the nagging worry in the back of his brain, where illogical worries flourish, that he’s somehow engineered the whole thing. He didn’t, he’s sure he didn’t. He’s sure he never floundered that far.
The emergency is in the engines, of course, the most vulnerable part of the ship, caused by a ripple of dark matter where none had been predicted.
He goes to the engine control room as soon as he hears the disharmonization and pulls up the engine hologram. It’s not in one of the engines itself, but in the condenser. Without the cooling system, carrying heat away from the engines to the thermal radiators, the backup cooling systems are running over-capacity and the engines will soon begin to overheat.
And, of course, it’s part of the system designed by Wei Ying.
He doesn’t believe it at first. He pours over it over and over again. He’s the chief engineer in charge of the engine systems. He must be able to fix the problem himself. But he can’t. He’s a theoretical engineer, a designer. He can’t weld or shape components. He certainly doesn’t understand the coolant system well enough.
He has to accept that an engineer must be woken to help him. He queries the system again and again, and again and again the first choice the system comes up with is Wei Ying.
Well. He can handle it. He can hide this obsession, he can treat Wei Ying just like any other engineer, just like another other person who will be the only person he will speak to for the rest of his life.
He closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath, then gives the order for Wei Ying to be woken.
Wei Ying
His skin stings, but there’s a gentle hand smoothing cream over it. He tries to move, but he’s trapped.
“You have been woken from cryosleep,” a soft voice says. “You are currently experiencing cryosickness. It will take you approximately thirteen hours to recover. Until that time you must be restrained for your own safety.
Wei Ying tries to speak, but no sound comes out. The gentle hand is back, pressing down a little on his shoulder. “Do not speak,” the voice says. “Wait.”
The voice is replaced by music, and later he’ll think he was hallucinating the sound of his favorite peaceful songs, the ones he’d made into a playlist when he was a university student having trouble sleeping at the thought of all the work he had to do.
The thirteen hours drift past as his body recovers and before it seems possible that that much time has passed he feels the restraints give way and a gentle hand, that same gentle hand as earlier, he thinks, is helping him sit up.
He looks up into the face of Lan Zhan and scrambles back on the bed. “Han… Hanguang-jun!” he exclaims.
“Please call me Lan Zhan,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying shakes his head. “I can’t… it would be too disrespectful, Hanguang-jun.”
Lan Zhan seems to consider this for a moment, then accept it. He holds out a tray. “You should eat to recover your strength,” he says.
The notion of Lan Zhan, the younger son of the Lan family, and the chief engineer in charge of the entire engine section (and the most beautiful man Wei Ying has ever seen) bringing Wei Ying food is almost as alarming being asked to call him by his name, but it would be worse to refuse, so he lets Lan Zhan balance the tray on his lap and obediently begins to eat.
He is starving, after all, and the tray contains some of his favorite food. He picks up a chunk of melon carefully with his chopsticks (his hands are a little shaky, probably the after effects of cryosickness), and squishes it between his tongue and palate, letting the sweet juice slip down his throat. It’s been so long since he’d had fresh fruit- it was astronomically expensive on Mars- and for a moment he can’t do anything but wallow in the pure bliss of it.
And then he opens his eyes and stares up at the impassive face of Lan Zhan.
“Ah, Hanguang-Jun,” Wei Ying says. “It was so kind of you to bring me food, but do you mind me asking why you are here, waiting on this lowly engineer?”
Lan Zhan is silent for a moment, and Wei Ying, still starving, eats another bite of melon.
“There was an accident,” Lan Zhan says. “In the engines. You were brought out of cryosleep early to fix it.” He pauses. “I was as well, for an earlier malfunction. Unfortunately I do not have the skills to handle the current issue.”
Wei Ying swallows the melon that’s in his mouth. “When you say ‘early’?” he prompts, his mind spinning.
“We are the only two awake on board the ship,” Lan Zhan says. “No others are due to be awakened for over two hundred years.”
Wei Ying gasps and the tray almost topples from his lap, but Lan Zhan rescues it and places it on a side table.
“I am sorry,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying peers up at him and he does look sorry. Even a little guilty, perhaps.
“It’s not your fault,” he says. “Better to be woken up early than for the ship to… what is wrong with the engines?”
“The primary coolant system has malfunctioned,” Lan Zhan explains.
“Oh!” Wei Ying says. “That’s my baby!”
“Yes,” Lan Zhan acknowledges. “That is why you were chosen.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Wei Ying says, beginning to lift himself up off the bed, but Lan Zhan motions for him to sit down again.
“You must eat to fully recover from cryosickness,” he says, placing the tray back on Wei Ying’s lap. “And you must fully recover from cryosickness before you can fix the engines.”
So Wei Ying eats the rest of his melon, the thin soup, and thick creamy porridge Lan Zhan had brought, while Lan Zhan explains the problem to him, then brings him to the engine control room, so he can see the holographic projections of the damage.
The whole time he keeps trying to forget about what Lan Zhan had said, about being trapped here with just him. Never seeing the Wens again. They were all supposed to have a new life here, finally free. They’d worked their asses off to ensure they all got berths and now…
He has to focus. He has to save the ship. He directs his attention to the data streaming on the workstation before him and forces his mind to become engrossed in the problem.
It takes five days to fix the coolant systems completely, shimmying down maintenance tubes, tugging a welding kit behind him, while Lan Zhan gives him directions and turns on and off the right valves. In one place they have to install a whole new conduit, bastardizing parts they steal from an axillary temperature control system.
Lan Zhan is patient and calm, surprisingly okay with taking orders from Wei Ying, though he is technically his subordinate. When they had started, Wei Ying had kept deferring to him, until Lan Zhan had reminded him that he was the one who knew the system best and therefore he was the one who should make the final decisions.
Wei Ying had stared at him, unused to hearing such a modest comment from a superior, but had quickly learned to accept it and Lan Zhan’s repeated requests for informality.
“It is possible that we will only see each other for the rest of our lives,” he had said.”Therefore, we should consider ourselves equals.”
Right. He… they… it was just them. After he eats dinner, in the company of Lan Zhan, he excuses himself and finds his way to the chambers that carried the cryotubes, following the computer’s directions until he reaches the right number. He looked down at the sleeping face, touching the glass panel.
“Jiejie,” he says, softly. “I’m sorry.”
His whole family is there, sleeping, Wen Qing, A-Ning, Popo, Uncle, A-Yuan. He visits each of them in turn. It’s his fault they’re on this ship in the first place- he’d scrimped and saved until he could get them all berths, and now he won’t be there when they wake up, won’t be able to see A-Yuan’s first glimpse of a blue sky, won’t be able to see Popo’s first taste of fresh vegetables since she was a little girl.
When he turns to leave, Lan Zhan is silhouetted in the doorway. He steps aside for Wei Ying to pass.
“You have family here?” Lan Zhan asks, sounding dismayed.
“Just a few,” Wei Ying says, wiping his face, surprised to find it wet.
“I do as well,” Lan Zhan says, falling into step beside him. “I often visit my brother. That’s how…” but he stops and even when Wei Ying looks at him doesn’t continue.
“Perhaps, now that we have time free I could show you about,” he says. “I activated the hydroponics system- a small portion of it anyway. And perhaps you would like to see the music room? If you play an instrument?”
Wei Ying swallows and tries to smile. “Yeah,” he says. “I’d like that.”
He’d helped build the ship, back in the Mars courtyards, but he’d only ever seen the engines and engine rooms. He stares at the slick white walls, green vines draped over them, a hydroponics system built throughout the ship.
“Wow,” he says, as they enter a wide atrium, meant to be a meeting place for people living in this section of the ship. “It’s so clean.”
“I scrub it down every day,” Lan Zhan says in his low, serious voice and it takes Wei Ying a moment to realize he’s joking, to chortle with laughter. Lan Zhan looks faintly pleased.
He takes him to see the hydroponics garden where the melons and other fruits and vegetables are growing, and picks a green pepper for Wei Ying to eat, crisp and fresh, just like that.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a fresh pepper before,” Wei Ying raves. “Ah, it’s so good- I could eat them all.”
“You can eat them all,” Lan Zhan says. “We are the only ones to eat them, and I do not mind if you do.”
Wei Ying stares at him. “I forgot we were alone,” he says. “How do you stand it?”
“I do not know,” Lan Zhan says, and, after a long moment: “I am not sure that I do.”
There is a music room and Lan Zhan plays his guqin for him, fingers slipping gracefully along the strings. There is a digital art studio, Lan Zhan’s paintings splashed on the large screen. There is an observatory where they stand and reflect on the emptiness of space. There is so much ship and after a while it becomes repetitive: empty rooms and empty hallways, all waiting for people to wake.
Wei Ying excuses himself and finds his way back to his quarters, sitting down on his bed, his limbs trembling. How does it keep hitting him that he will never see his family again? Shouldn’t he know by now? Shouldn’t he be used to loss?
Lan Zhan comes to his room a few hours later with a tray of food. He sees Wei Ying’s face and leaves, only to come back a moment later with a cloth and a bowl of warm water. He sits Wei Ying on the bed and very gently washes his face.
“You must eat,” he says, when he’s done. “You will feel like there’s no point, but still you must continue.”
“Why?” Wei Ying asks. “If there’s no point?”
Lan Zhan can’t answer. Finally he says: “I will go.”
But Wei Ying catches his arm and then releases it, apologizing. “Do you think,” he begins. He swallows. “Do you think you could stay? I’m not sure I want to be alone.”
Perhaps Lan Zhan melts a little then. He is a hard man to read. He turns his face toward Wei Ying and holds the tray out again. “Eat first,” he says.
Wei Ying smiles. “The cost of your companionship?” he teases, but Lan Zhan answers, very seriously: “yes.”
Lan Zhan takes him to a room with a large screen at one end and shows him a movie from a hundred years ago.
“It’s my favorite,” he says, with what might be a tiny smile. “It makes me a little homesick, though Shanghai didn’t really look like that now.”
He’s close enough to Wei Ying that Wei Ying can feel his body heat radiating off of him. Wei Ying wants to move closer, to press against his side and put his head on his shoulder, to take all the comfort he can get on this empty ship, but Lan Zhan sits straight, almost rigidly, his eyes fixed on the screen, and Wei Ying thinks it’s probably best not to take liberties with the only person he will ever speak to again.
In the morning, Lan Zhan comes to his room and wakes him and asks him if he wants to join him. He’s wearing tight, stretchy clothing that reveals every rippling muscle on his lean frame. Wei Ying swallows and averts his eyes. “What are you doing?” he asks.
“Oh,” Lan Zhan says. “Yoga.”
Wei Ying fights an internal war for a moment and then agrees and finds himself pushing his body into increasingly contorted position alongside the inhumanly flexible Lan Zhan. Sometimes Lan Zhan breaks his pose to manipulate Wei Ying’s limbs into position, and Wei Ying finds himself incredibly grateful he’s not wearing the tight clothing Lan Zhan offered to him.
“Your body is still weak from cryosleep,” he says, when Wei Ying wobbles and falls out of position, Lan Zhan there to catch him. “You will become stronger with time.”
Wei Ying lies still in the position he fell into. “I think that’s enough yoga for me for one day,” he says, and Lan Zhan, upside down in his field of vision, does something that looks like it might be distantly related to a smile.
“After this I usually go for a jog,” he says.
“Oh,” Wei Ying says. “I’m just going to stay here.”
Before he leaves to run in his criminally tight clothes through the ship (not that there’s anyone to see him), Lan Zhan brings Wei Ying a bottle of water and a pillow.
He’s back a while later, cleaned and dressed in the much less revealing tunic and trousers he usually wears around the ship, and helps Wei Ying get up from where he’s still lying on the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he says, as Wei Ying groans as he gets to his feet. “I forgot how weak one is after cryosleep. I should not have gone so hard on you.”
Wei Ying can’t help but hear the innuendo Lan Zhan surely didn’t mean. “Don’t apologize,” he says. “I should have sat out when I started feeling tired.”
Lan Zhan does that almost-smile thing again, then asks him if he wants breakfast, helping him over to the table and ordering food for him from the replicator.
“It’s good,” Wei Ying says eating a bite of the food. “What we got on Mars was always so tasteless. Sometimes it was the hardest thing convincing A-Yuan to eat his food.”
“A-Yuan?” Lan Zhan asks.
Wei Ying nods. “My… a member of my family. He’s only four.” He pauses. “He was only four. Does years spent in cryosleep count?”
“Since we don’t wake up any wiser, I don’t think they should,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying can’t help laughing. “Do you think every year should make us wiser?” he asks.
“Yes,” Lan Zhan says, without hesitation.
“What if we fuck up?” Wei Ying says.
“Then we learn from our mistakes,” Lan Zhan says.
“What if we don’t learn from them?” Wei Ying asks.
“Then we repeat them until we do,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying smiles at him. “I see you are immovable in your convictions,” he says.
“I hope my convictions are strong enough that a short conversation will not shake them,” Lan Zhan agrees. “Although you are convincing.”
“Eh?” Wei Ying asks. “What about me is convincing?” but Lan Zhan stands up and takes the breakfast dishes. “Hey, Lan Zhan,” he says. “You can’t just leave me hanging like that.”
“You are not hanging, you are sitting,” Lan Zhan says, and Wei Ying swears he’s wearing a smirk.
Lan Zhan’s days are packed with activities; working in the hydroponics garden, playing the guqin. He writes and reads and does calligraphy. He runs and does yoga, is always fiddling with the replicator programming. Sometimes Wei Ying joins him and sometimes he doesn’t, Sometimes he’s absorbed in his own projects or his own research. Sometimes he just wants to be alone.
When he does, Lan Zhan always comes finds him after a few hours, usually when he thinks he’s missed a meal. He hands Wei Ying the tray then sits down besides him and patiently waits until Wei Ying eats.
“I’m not a child,” he says. “You don’t have to parent me.”
“You could demonstrate your maturity by taking proper care of yourself,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying glares at him. “What’s it to you?” he asks belligerently.
“You are my only companion,” Lan Zhan answers softly. “I would like you to survive as long as possible.”
Wei Ying snorts. “How flattering- I’m the only man left on Earth. Metaphorically,” he adds.
Lan Zhan shifts a little. “I am glad it’s you,” he says, and then his eyes widen. “I don’t mean I wanted you to be in this situation,” he adds quickly. “Just… of all the people I could be left alone with…”
“You wanted a hyper, flighty, depressed, ADHD engineer without a serious bone in his body?” Wei Ying asks.
“I do not believe all those things are true,” Lan Zhan says. “But for those that are, yes.”
Wei Ying stares at him. “Lan Zhan,” he begins.
Lan Zhan is looking at him with an expression of panic. Wei Ying stares at him for a long moment.
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” he asks finally.
“I am not a mind reader!” Lan Zhan snaps, then steps back, looking horrified with himself.
Wei Ying takes a deep breath. “Lan Zhan,” he says again. “You want me?”
Lan Zhan’s eyes are wide and terrified. “I did not mean,” he begins, but he can’t finish.
“I want you too,” Wei Ying says, roughly. “It’s a terrible idea, isn’t it? We’re stuck here together for the rest of our lives. If… you should know I’m not terribly reliable.”
“I don’t believe that that’s true,” Lan Zhan says.
Wei Ying laughs. “You don’t know me,” he says.
“I want to,” Lan Zhan whispers and then he’s right there, large hands gentle Wei Ying’s waist, cupping Wei Ying’s cheek. “I’ve wanted to know you ever since I saw you.”
“Oh,” Wei Ying says, and turns his head just the slightest amount, pressed their cheeks together and their lips, puts his hand on the base of Lan Zhan’s neck, on his hip, presses their lips tightly together, then increases the pressure until Lan Zhan’s mouth slips open and then they’re kissing deeply and hungrily, tongues and teeth and frantic movements, hands slipping under clothes and nails scraping across skin and the tray of food Lan Zhan brought spills across the floor and neither of them even stop to look.
Wei Ying presses Lan Zhan down on the bed, his torso and all those muscles finally on display, his trousers lose at the waist, his mouth red and open like a gaping wound.
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says, and crawls onto the bed, straddles his waist and puts his forearms down on either side of his head, “what do you want?”
“You,” Lan Zhan gasps out.
“Mn?” Wei Ying asks. “What do you want from me?”
“Everything,” Lan Zhan says, and Wei Ying wants to do everything to him, he really does, so he leans down and mouths Lan Zhan’s long throat, his Adam’s apple, the hinge of his jaw.
Lan Zhan whines and thrusts up. “Wei Ying,” he says, and Wei Ying turns his head and kisses under his ear, tangles his hand in the hair at the nape of Lan Zhan’s neck.
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan hisses and he grabs Wei Ying and rolls them inexpertly, until they’re facing each other sideways.
“Yeah?” Wei Ying asks, cheekily, “what do you want?”
Lan Zhan’s hips thrust against Wei Ying as if they’re out of his control.
“Have you done this before?” Wei Ying whispers.
Lan Zhan shakes his head. “But I’ve watched a lot of porn,” he admits.
Wei Ying throws back his head and howls. “Porn!” he exclaims.
“The first time it was unintentional,” Lan Zhan says, his hip still moving a little, shifting suddenly so their hard cocks are rubbing together. “I didn’t realize the nature of the media until…”
“There were naked people rubbing their bodies on each other?” Wei Ying asks, with a teasing smile.
“Some days it’s hard to feel anything,” Lan Zhan says.
This is not an appropriate time to come, Wei Ying tells his dick and grasps Lan Zhan’s hips so he’ll stop rocking them.
“Watching porn made me feel something,” he adds, with a sigh.
“Oh, baby,” Wei Ying says and ignores the way the word makes Lan Zhan tremble. “It’s been a hard five years, huh?” He leans forward and kisses Lan Zhan, sweetly, gently, despite how desperate he feels. “You won’t be alone again.”
It’s hard to do anything but have sex after that, but Lan Zhan is a person of impressive inner strength and habit and he makes them get up and clean off, tend the hydroponics gardens, get exercize (“sex is exercize,” Wei Ying protests), and eat properly.
Eventually the urgency of it wears off and they spend more time out of bed at their various hobbies. Sometimes Wei Ying visits his family, asleep and peaceful in the enormous cryobay, tells them about Lan Zhan and all the gross details- smutty and sappy- they’d yell at him for sharing if they were awake.
Sometimes he just wanders the ship, poking into storage rooms, crawling through maintenance tunnels, examining the flight controls and the ventilator systems and the deep space telescopes.
And then, one day, he comes across a room and finds two empty cryotubes where they have been packed up and put away.
And he thinks: “Oh, we’re idiots.” Because he and Lan Zhan are two of the smartest people he’s ever met, they’re engineers and they’ve got all of human knowledge at their fingertips and yet they were told they couldn’t get back into cryosleep and they just accepted it.
“We’re idiots,” he tells Lan Zhan when he finds him, bent over the guqin.
Lan Zhan looks up at him.
“Did you even try to make the cryotubes work again?” he asks him.
Lan Zhan stares. “No, I…” he says finally. “I assumed…”
“Lan Zhan,” Wei Ying says. “We can do it, we can make them work again.”
“How?” Lan Zhan asks, standing up and stepping around the instrument.
“I don’t know,” Wei Ying says, “but we’ve both done things people have told us were impossible before. I mean you practically broke the laws of physics building the engines, so, why don’t we try?”
“What if we can’t?” Lan Zhan asks.
“Then at least we know we didn’t give in,” Wei Ying says. “And it won’t be bad, will it? Having each other? But it would be better if we had each other and our families.”
Lan Zhan looks hesitant for a moment, then nods. “Let us try then,” he says.
“Yes,” Wei Ying cries. He throws his arms around Lan Zhan and kisses him.
Lan Zhan
They spend a lot less time having sex then, but Wei Ying is beautiful now in a way he hadn’t been before, on fire with determination and hope, excited and invested and Lan Zhan realizes, with a little twist of fear, that Lan Zhan will never be enough for him.
It’s hard- there are a million problems to solve, all the reasons why the technology for putting people into cryostasis hadn’t been on the ship in the first place, from the centrifugal gravity interfering with the functioning of the machine, to the lack of cryofluids, the difficulty of sterilizing the used cryopods, and so on. They divide the problems up sometimes- Wei Ying, with his greater foundation in chemistry takes it upon himself to synthesize the cryofluids and turns one of the waste remediation hubs into a chemistry lab. Lan Zhan takes on the task of creating a gyroscopic platform to correct for the gravitational issue. Some tasks they tackle together, developing a new type of UV light to sterilize parts of the cryopod too delicate to be sterilized with heat (Wei Ying gets a terrible sunburn in the process).
It takes them two years. “We’re in no rush,” Wei Ying had said, at one point. “Better to take longer than to fuck it up and die.”
Lan Zhan can’t argue with that and he’s in no rush in particular. He dreads the day he has to share Wei Ying with other people, dreads him looking around at the tens of thousands of people on the ship and realizing he has options.
Because he’ll take them, Lan Zhan has no doubt. He’ll trade him for someone as vivid and alive as himself, no matter how much Wei Ying swears that he loves him, no matter how much he shows it in and out of bed.
And so, because he’s dreading it, the project seems to take no time at all. No time until the have vats of cryofluids, until the cryopods are set up on the gyroscopic platform, until there’s only one hurdle left; the cryopods are so jury-rigged, they can’t be operated by the AI. They spend weeks trying to solve the problem, every idea more ridiculous than the last, until in the end they just spend hours staring at the cryopods.
“Well,” Wei Ying says, and leans on Lan Zhan. “I guess that’s that then. We’re just gonna have to be stuck with each other, huh Lan Zhan?”
And Lan Zhan remembers how sad Wei Ying had been, before they’d started the project, empty and hollow like a deflated balloon. How he’d needed a purpose, a project. How he needs, Lan Wangji thinks, a family.
“No,” Lan Zhan says. “You must go into the cryotube. Your family…”
Wei Ying looks at him, hurt. “You can’t think I would go without you?” he asks. “You can’t think I’d leave you all alone?”
Lan Zhan closes his eyes, makes a terrible choice. “I deserve it,” he says.
“What?” Wei Ying asks, pulling back startled.
“I… I woke you up on purpose,” Lan Zhan lies.
“But the coolant repairs,” Wei Ying says.
“I could have done them myself,”Lan Zhan lies. “I was obsessed with you. I couldn’t help myself.”
Wei Ying is just staring at him, confused, aghast, so Lan Zhan pulls up the files he hid so carefully when Wei Ying woke up, the ones he’d copied from Wei Ying’s personal files, the ones of Wei Ying smiling and laughing and singing.
“I saw you in the cryobay,” he says, aware of how his voice is breaking. “I saw your face and I couldn’t forget it, so I kept going back and looking at it again and again and then I broke into your files and I used to fall asleep to the sound of you singing. And then the coolant system broke and I had an excuse to wake you up and I couldn’t help myself, I couldn’t… So you have to go back to sleep, you have to… I’m so sorry- I didn’t know you had a family. You have to.”
He dares to look at Wei Ying then, and cringes at the sight of Wei Ying’s face, cold and shuttered.
“How dare you?” Wei Ying whispers. “I loved you. I thought I was so lucky that of all the people I got stuck with it was you.” He laughs harshly. “Turns out you’re a psychopath. Just my luck. Fine. Make up for your mistake then.”
He strips carelessly and pulls on the cryo-jumper and Lan Zhan begins the procedure to put him into cryosleep, can’t help touching him tenderly to place the electrodes, to begin the process of filling the tube with fluid, to help him into the tube and begin the infusion of the drug that will put him to sleep.
His body begins to relax first, as the drug begins to take effect, and then he suddenly looks up at Lan Zhan and gasps and pulls the respirator of his mouth with trembling hands. “You lied to me,” he says, clumsy with the cryodrugs. “You didn’t wake me up on purpose.”
“Wei Ying, lie back down,” Lan Zhan urges.
“You couldn’t have fixed the coolant system by yourself,” Wei Ying says. “You don’t know how to weld.”
“I was lying,” Lan Zhan says.
“You’re lying now,” Wei Ying says.
“Lay down!” Lan Zhan says, more urgently.
“You… why? Why?”
“You’ll be happier without me,” Lan Zhan says. “With your family, helping to start the colony. You’ll… you deserve more than me.”
“You idiot,” Wei Ying says, but the drug is taking hold and his voice is growing fuzzy. “I won’t be happier without you. You’re my home.”
“Wei Ying,” Lan Zhan says. If he doesn’t shut the cryotube the fluid will begin spilling out.
“Find a way,” Wei Ying says. “Promise me you’ll find a way.”
And Lan Zhan promises him so he’ll put the respirator back in, so he’ll lie down in the fluid, so he’ll close his eyes and fall asleep.
Wei Ying
Wei Ying wakes to the happy face of A-Yuan peering down at him, Wen Qing scowling beside him. He opens his mouth to speak, but Qing-jie’s scowl deepens. “No talking,” she says. “You have thirteen hours.”
A-Yuan curls up beside him and cuddles against his side.
Wen Qing looks at something in her peripheral. “What the hell were you thinking?” she demands after a minute. Wei Ying guesses she’s been trying to restrain herself and has failed. “Putting yourself in jury-rigged cryosleep like that. We had a hell of a time getting you out.”
He blinks up at her, wondering if he could be telepathic if he tried hard enough. What happened to Lan Zhan? he tries to project at her, but she’s still scowling at the mid-distance. A moment later a man appears and for a moment Wei Ying’s heart thumps hard in his throat until he realizes it’s must be Lan Zhan’s brother, his eyes darker, his posture more relaxed.
“Engineer Wei,” he says with a broad smile that erases most of the resemblance. “I read a very interesting account of your adventure mid-flight.”
That’s nice, Wei Ying thinks. Let me sleep or cut to the chase.
“I have to thank you for keeping my brother company,” Lan Huan says.
Wei Ying closes his eyes. It’s to be torture then.
“He’s never opened up to a person the way he seems to have opened up to you,” Lan Huan says. “The materials he left behind, the picture he painted of you. I’m glad he found a person like you even for a short time in his life.”
Wei Ying’s heart sinks. He’s dead then, he never found a way to make the second cryotube work. He closes his eyes. Lan Huan is still talking about some song, about a collection of poems he found. “When we found the two of you we didn’t know what to think, and the way you’d put yourselves in cryostasis made it much harder to find a way to get you out.”
Wei Ying’s eyes snap open and for the first time he allows himself to hope. The two of you.
“We had to go through your files to figure out what you did,” Lan Huan says. “It wasn’t intentionally invasive. I must admit, when I first found the pictures of you in his file I thought the worst- our family has some… obsessive tendencies…”
What the fuck? Wei Ying thinks.
“But then I read his account of what happened- he must have left it behind in case it didn’t work out. He left you a letter too, but I think he’s going to have to be the one to decide whether to give it to you or not.”
The relief that floods him is so intense he wonders for a moment if he orgasmed on the strength of it. Lan Zhan is alive. Alive enough to decide whether he’s going to give him a letter. Probably somewhere just outside of Wei Ying’s vision getting the same treatment.
But no. “Ge,” a voice says a moment later, chiding. Lan Huan turns and smiles and a moment later Lan Zhan, still wobbling a little on his legs, appears, his long fingers immediately moving down to cup Wei Ying’s cheek. “Wei Ying,” he whispers, his voice still rough from cryosleep.
Wei Ying closes his eyes again and bites his lip, then opens them to see Lan Zhan bent over him.
“I’m sorry for lying to you,” Lan Zhan says, softly, his fingers smoothing down Wei Ying’s hair. In Wei Ying’s periphery he sees Wen Qing scooping up A-Yuan and carrying him, protesting, away.
Lan Zhan sits down on the side of the bed. Wei Ying feels his hand on his waist and sighs.
Lan Zhan opens his mouth like he’s going to say something more, but instead he lies down, his head cradled on Wei Ying’s chest, their bodies pressed together, and laces the fingers of their hands together. Wei Ying squeezes his hand for a moment, then closes his eyes again, content with the knowledge that he’ll be there when he wakes up.