Work Text:
When Xie Lian falls asleep next to his feverish husband, who’s burning off a powerful curse, he’s hurled from the fogginess of a dream into wakefulness again with a snap, but he isn’t in bed this time.
He’s in a field.
A field trodden and littered with soldiers’ bodies.
The ground is as hard as stone from lack of rain, soaked with blood that does nothing to turn it soft. The insatiable dirt drinks it down its gullet. As he turns a circle, he’s overcome with familiarity. It’s something about the oppressive heat. The smell. But then he notices a banner—the war banner once carried by the Xianle rebels who launched death throe campaigns to take back the capital from Yong’an conquerors, who could not be displaced. He heard about them while on the run.
He’s back in time, then. Probably a byproduct of close proximity to his cursed husband. Perhaps this is what Hua Cheng was dreaming about, and he’s simply been thrown back in time to his husband’s nocturnal preoccupation. If that’s the case, he should return home once Hua Cheng wakes, but he should tread carefully in the meantime.
If anyone were to spot him here, a fugitive prince, it would end badly. And if he were to change the past on accident, who knows every event he would undo?
He’s in his cultivator robes, the ones he fell asleep in, and his shackles are gone, so he has to remain completely undetected—not only by the citizens of this country but by Jun Wu, who might stumble upon him in his obsessive focus on Xianle.
Xie Lian considers hiding, but right when he sets off in the opposite direction of the capital, something catches the corner of his eye. A body.
The profile of a face he’d know anywhere in the world.
Hong-er.
At first, Xie Lian thinks the boy is dead, and horror paralyzes him—this is what his husband is dreaming about? His body lying forgotten in a field? But then Xie Lian gathers himself and approaches, only to hear shallow, rapid breathing.
Oh. Hong-er is alive.
No.
He’s dying.
Devastation seizes Xie Lian because, with brutal clarity, he accepts this isn’t an event he can circumvent. His husband has to die, or the entire course of their future is thrown into disarray. He has to die, and Xie Lian has to watch this time.
But not from the sidelines. He can’t stand here as Hong-er suffers. He can’t leave him alone like that.
He closes the last remaining distance between them and slides to his knees next to Hong-er. The boy’s half-lidded left eye is locked on the thin shroud of clouds above. There’s an arrow embedded in his throat, just off center, its shaft snapped. He’s also bleeding from his stomach. So much blood it’s nearly black. Neither wound has Hong-er’s focus. Instead, he watches the sky and limply clutches a crushed white flower resting on his leather breastplate, over his heart.
Xie Lian fights tears. He can’t lose it, not here, not right now. This moment isn’t about him. It’s about his husband and the last minutes of his life, prematurely ended. Minutes Xie Lian can imbue with peace. There’s plausible deniability here. This could be a dying hallucination, one Hong-er could carry with him for eight hundred years and cling to in his darkest moments.
Determined to give him that gift, Xie Lian reaches out with a gentle hand, cups Hong-er’s face, and turns it toward him.
A single sluggish eye meets his.
Then the smallest smile twitches at Hong-er’s bloody, parted lips.
Around his horrible, hopeless hyperventilation, he croaks, “Y…Your…High…ness.”
“It’s me.”
“H…High…ness.”
“I’m here.”
“C…Couldn’t…pro…tect…y…”
“Shh,” Xie Lian says, stroking the boy’s sweaty, clammy cheek with his thumb. “You did well. I’m proud of you.”
Another twitch of a smile.
“Y…Your…”
“I’ve got you. I’m here,” Xie Lian assures him, but his eyes mist. With force, he blinks the moisture away, refusing to miss a single second of his husband’s death. His smile is heartbroken as he mirrors Hong-er’s loving gaze. “I won’t leave you. I promise. I’m here. I see you.” A gleam in Hong-er’s eye. “Mm. I see you. I remember you. Thank you for your hard work.”
Long pauses appear between Hong-er’s desperate gasps for air.
“H…High…ness…”
“Hong-er.”
Xie Lian leans down and presses a wobbly kiss to a bare patch of Hong-er’s forehead, a small triangle of skin that isn’t covered by his stringy hair or the bandages over his right eye. The next kiss is to Hong-er’s nose. Finally, featherlight, to his upper lip. With all the boy’s strength, he returns that kiss. The faintest press of his mouth to Xie Lian’s. Then his lips separate again, huffing out tiny, dying breaths.
“W…Wait…for… Be…back… W…on’t…leave…y…”
“I know,” Xie Lian says, whispering to keep his voice from breaking. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
He continues to smile down at Hong-er, his jaw quivering around a suppressed sob. One of his hands pets Hong-er’s cheek. The other cards through the boy’s dark hair.
It takes longer than it should.
Hong-er’s eye stays on him. His mouth remains open. But his breathing gets shallower and shallower, then becomes imperceptible. His body twitches. Silence. Another twitch.
Nothing.
Xie Lian folds his hand over Hong-er’s and balls it tighter around that crushed flower, and only after the boy is gone does Xie Lian allow himself to weep, giving himself over to grief and sorrow, to all the regret of eight hundred years past. At some point, he returns to the future: there are feverish kisses being pressed to his brow.
“Gege,” Hua Cheng soothes him. “Don’t cry.”
Xie Lian hacks out a sob, laughing despite his pain. “San Lang…do you…do you remember your last moments?”
“I do,” his husband says calmly, wiping away Xie Lian’s tears until he regains some of his composure. “I slipped into a dream.”
“Yeah?” Xie Lian’s eyelashes stick together. He knows he looks like a mess, but Hua Cheng has seen him in worse states and has loved him all the same. “Do you remember what you saw?”
Hua Cheng smiles, his eye glazed and tired. He’s a furnace, but not as hot as he was a few hours ago. “Yes,” he says, and cups Xie Lian’s cheeks. “You.”