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Shen Yuan thinks he’s going mad.
He’s been having weird dreams for… (How long has it been now?) for a while. Dreams of shadows, of a strange, apocalyptic, fantastical world. Dreams that leave him disoriented when he wakes because for that brief moment upon rousing, he wonders which is the dream and which is reality. Dreams of a man with curling hair as dark as ink and eyes like sanguine garnets, and a sigil between his brows the same crimson shade as his eyes. Dreams of blood and heat and sex, in detail and intensity at odds with his lifestyle as a single straight virgin shut-in.
At first, he thinks it’s a side-effect of the melatonin he’s been taking in an attempt to regulate his piss-poor sleep cycle. He stops taking it and resigns himself to being a gremlin with a circadian rhythm stuck in a timezone halfway around the world.
The dreams don’t stop, his sleeping schedule remains a mess, and now… Now, he’s hearing voices while he’s awake.
At least, he thinks he’s awake, because he’s not so sure anymore these days.
He’s watched the ‘Inception’ movie several times. Once when it first came out, another time or two at streamed movie marathon nights with online friends, and then snippets when he was bored and the YouTube algorithm decided to insert random clips from random parts of the movie into his ‘Recommended’ section. So he knows what the plot is about and he remembers enough key scenes and moments from it.
He tries to leave himself messages and clues so that he can figure out whether he’s awake or if he’s dreaming. But the problem is that tricks that work in the movie won’t work for his situation.
In the movie, the characters use personal totems that are unique to each individual, with secret details or special traits that only the characters themselves know about. This prevents a dream forger from recreating a totem perfectly and it’s how a character can tell if they’re in a created dreamscape or not.
But since dream sharing isn’t a technology that actually exists, whatever Shen Yuan dreams about when he falls asleep is coming entirely from his own brain, however implausible much of his dreams seem to be. Whatever Shen Yuan makes his totem from and no matter the details he puts into it, his brain will obviously know and be able to recreate it perfectly. So what use is it? If anything, having his dream be shared means that someone else, a trusted person, might be useful as a differentiator. But this is real life and not a movie and shared dreamscapes aren’t real.
The voice he’s been hearing is the same as the one he hears in his dreams, which doesn’t help with his problem of differentiating waking and dreaming. It’s the same rumbling baritone that makes his fine hairs prickle with apprehension even as his belly clenches for a whole different reason.
It belongs to that man. The one from his dreams. He doesn’t know the man’s name, just that he’s royalty or nobility because he refers to himself as ‘this lord’ with exactly the kind of nonchalance and extinct, old-world formality that only exists now in period media and historical reenactments. Ergo, not real.
Shen Yuan doesn’t know how or why he’s dreaming of that man. He isn’t anyone familiar and Shen Yuan is fairly sure he’d remember ever meeting him. The way his mystery dream man looks and speaks and carries himself… That isn’t the kind of person that anyone — but especially someone with a social life in the negatives, like Shen Yuan — can forget. No matter the limitless creative ingenuity of mankind, surely it requires some kind of base reference to draw inspiration from?
On days like today, when his chronic health issues leave him weak and tired and in too much pain to get out of bed until toilet breaks become too pressing to ignore, he wonders if this is a sign that his prescription meds are starting to take a toll on his mind. The ones he takes aren’t supposed to have any hallucinatory side effects. At least not in the dosage he’s been prescribed (and has been carefully adhering to, even when his bad days tempt him to take ‘just a bit more’).
“Shen Yuan, beloved. You’re tired, my love. Go back to sleep. This lord will help you feel much better.”
“You aren’t real,” he mutters to himself, knowing that he must sound just as mad as he feels. “Go away. You aren’t real.”
He fists his hands in his blanket and stares up at the ceiling. It’s one of the few surfaces of his room not covered by posters and merchandise from the various shows and games and stories that distract him from the prison of his existence. Shen Yuan once tried sticking a poster to his ceiling. He nearly had a heart attack (oddly enough, he has ninety-nine health issues but cardiac ones aren’t one) when that poster came loose several nights later and fell on him in the middle of the night while he was sleeping. In his somnolent panic, he’d accidentally ripped the poster — an autographed limited edition item that couldn’t be replaced.
He tried his (inconsolable) best to repair it and it’s been hidden away in a deep corner of his merch pile so that he doesn’t have to look at it and be reminded of his carelessness. Shen Yuan hasn’t dared put anything else up on his ceiling since.
The ceiling is white and unmarred, save for a few grey cracks in the paint that appeared when the piling works for the foundation of a nearby condominium project began. There’s also a wisp of a dusty cobweb that he was too tired and lazy to sweep away and it’s now his Emotional Support Cobweb. He looks at the ceiling and, not for the first nor the last time, he thinks that it’s a perfect representation of his life. It’s empty, barren, blank, utterly devoid of substance of any kind, yet too blemished to actually be a perfect canvas for something unless preparatory action is taken to first make it smooth and clean.
He wonders why he’s alive and why he fights so hard to stay that way when his own body doesn’t seem to want to live anymore.
“Go to sleep, my love,” says the voice, husky and soothing. “My A-Yuan is so tired.”
And he is. So tired. Not just in body but also in mind. He doesn’t really work. Not in the traditional sense. His parents give him a monthly stipend so he doesn’t have to work. He isn’t ‘gainfully employed’, unless you count the occasional novels and dramas and movies he’s paid to review and the sporadic monetised or sponsored content he creates on the media that he isn’t paid to critique as ‘work’. He’s able to do even that little because such work is less beholden to the whims of his broken, pain-riddled body and the faulty, failing systems contained within.
But although he doesn’t experience the draining daily grind that others do, it doesn’t mean his life isn’t a tiring one. It’s more exhausting than people think to be constantly fighting your own body. It takes him more energy than it would a hale and hearty individual to simply stand up and walk to his bathroom, or to go to the kitchen to put fuel into his uncooperative body, or — god willing — go to the mailbox downstairs to collect his myriad of test results, let alone do much else beyond that.
He has his food and groceries delivered to his doorstep. Sometimes, he leaves the non-perishables by the door because he has no more energy or motivation left (after putting the Very Much Perishable items away) to deal with them. On the rare occasion that he needs more clothes, he orders them online and prays to The Sweatshop Gods that the shop’s sizing chart is accurate because he has negative fucks left to give to deal with something as effort-consuming as Returning An Item.
Even his routine follow-ups with his collection of specialists (for refills of his prescription or updates on how certain medications are working out for him) take place via video call. On the occasion that he needs to go to a clinic or hospital for an in-person checkup, one of his family members will show up with their car or a hired driver to escort him for his appointment. They are, besides the housekeeper who comes by twice weekly, the only semi-regular face-to-face human interactions he has.
“The isolation isn’t good for you,” his mother has said in the past when she tried to persuade him to move back into the family home. But Shen Yuan had refused, insisting that he needed some semblance of independence more than he needed human interaction. That if he was coddled any further, he’d smother himself in his pillow before his (well-meaning) family members smothered him with their care.
The compromise is dinner back at the family home at least once a month, escorted there in the same manner as his health checkups. He dreads them each time not because he doesn’t love his family — he does, so very much — but because answering their well-intentioned questions is so mentally and emotionally draining, and the literal exertion of the visit leaves him physically exhausted and in agony.
It’s created an accidental negative association whereby, in the days leading up to the visit, his various conditions and symptoms flare up and he feels like he’s been hit by a truck (and the truck is still right on top of him).
“My darling, why do you torment yourself so? You require rest.”
“Not real,” he reminds himself. “You aren’t real.”
Shen Yuan doesn’t mention the voices during his next video call with his specialist. He does mention the vivid dreaming though, and how unrested he feels when he wakes up after having one. His doctor prescribes him a course of strong sleep aids that will put him into a sleep so deep that he hopefully won’t dream. It’s not a permanent solution but it will hopefully, ideally, break the cycle of exhaustion and dreaming and possibly reset the wonky wiring in his wonky brain. His doctor explains it all much better, but that’s why he has the fancy certificates and Shen Yuan doesn’t.
He takes the sleep meds as prescribed and gets a full week of restful, uninterrupted sleep. Even the frequency of his auditory hallucinations seem to reduce. Shen Yuan’s mood improves and even his body seems to perk up slightly as a result. It’s the best week he’s had in… in however long he can remember having even since his frail constitution really started tanking in mid-adolescence.
Even the family dinner he attends at the end of the week feels less like an obligation to suffer through and is almost enjoyable. His even mother remarks on how much better he looks since the last time she saw him. Normally, such comments leave him feeling snappish and out of sorts but this time, he takes it for the concerned compliment that it is and agrees with her, giving her a smile he genuinely feels.
He takes those sleep meds for a week, stops it for another, and then takes it again at half-dose for another week. That’s the full course of it and after a second rest week, he’s supposed to check in with his doctor. It goes well, which is in itself one of the few things in his recent medical history that have gone according to plan, and Shen Yuan is giddy with excitement to let his doctor know.
It doesn’t last — because of course it doesn’t. The night before Shen Yuan’s video appointment, he dreams again.
He dreams of a bed of midnight-dark silk and his mystery man looming over him, eyes and forehead sigil alike glowing slightly with ruby-tinged light.
“I’ve missed you so much, my beloved,” the man says, cupping Shen Yuan’s cheek in his massive palm. “You’ve been so tired and this lord has been worried. I decided to let you rest and indeed, you seem much rejuvenated.” The man smiles, slow and wide and his objectively gorgeous face draws closer and he leans in. “Why don’t you show this lord how lively you feel, hmm?”
The rest of the dream progresses as it usually does, which is to say there’s round after round of energetic sex in positions Shen Yuan shouldn’t even be able to conceive of let alone dream about, and which all belong more in a professional gay porno than a chronically-ill, touch-starved straight virgin’s dream.
He wakes as he comes in his underwear to the ghostly impression of a huge cock spurting deep in his ass. The crooning voice in his ear seems to linger even after the unpleasant wetness at his crotch draws him firmly out of his embarrassingly pleasant wet dream.
“Such a good boy, coming untouched just from having this lord come inside you. A-Yuan is so sweet, so responsive to his master’s touch. I’ve trained your body perfectly, my love. Shen Yuan takes this lord so well now.”
There’s an echo of a touch, like the faintest breeze caressing his cheek and then lips before the voice speaks again.
“Next time, let’s see if you can come just from having your pretty mouth fucked. It’s okay if you can’t. It’ll be another goal for this lord to train you to reach. And I’ll make sure you enjoy every bit of it, my treasure.”
With an aching lurch, Shen Yuan forces himself out of bed and staggers into his bathroom, where he strips his soiled underwear and clothes off and stands underneath the spray of his shower. Despair reduces him to tears, the salty drops mingling and disappearing into the hot water falling over him. Shame wells up in him when, as he washes the tacky slick of his spend off his dick, a curl of arousal rises within him, making his dick jerk and his ass throb with want.
Shen Yuan is going crazy, he knows he is, and he doesn’t think he can stop his descent into madness. The worst thing is that if it continues much longer, he doesn’t know if he’ll even want to care by then. The worst thing is that part of him — the part of him that has been waiting to die from ennui and constant pain — is looking forward to it.
Shen Yuan is going mad and he’s terrified that he isn’t more scared about it.