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Jin Guangyao isn’t too keen on the idea of spelunking. He’d never understood Nie Mingjue’s fascination, nor Xichen’s cheeriness with regards to the former’s hobby. Hell, he isn’t quite sure why Huaisang of all people suddenly wants to go after years of being pressured into it by his big brother.
Willingly crawling into a dark cave, with few or no exits available, all dangerous, some dead-ends… Jin Guangyao has his hangups, which is why every time his boyfriends had invited him, he’d politely come up with some excuse to turn them down.
For a few years now, it’s been just the one boyfriend, turned husband, and no pressure to do anything more dangerous than take a boat out to see the fireworks on the shore in the summer.
But…
“Please, Yao-ge?” Huaisang gives him the most pathetic look he can muster. “Since he… since Jiang Cheng… I need this. You understand, don’t you?”
Several things occur in his mind at once. One: Huaisang will owe him a favor, certainly, and a huge one considering. Two: Huaisang doesn’t seem at all interested in the extreme deep dives that Nie Mingjue was into, so it likely won’t be very difficult to begin with.
Three: Back then, he never… Jin Guangyao clears his mind with a smile.
“Of course, Huaisang. You know I’m here for you. Just name the date.”
Nie Huaisang mirrors that smile.
They drive there at the crack of dawn. It’s an unassuming place in the mountains, up a dirt road so rough it could hardly be considered one. Even Nie Mingjue’s old Jeep seems to have trouble with it as Huaisang drives.
When they park, it’s in a glade of evergreen, misted with dew, sunrise peeking through the needles and heedless of the dark patch of storm clouds gathering in the distance. The entrance to the cave itself is covered up by the guide house, Nie Huaisang explains as they walk up to the front door. It looks as though it could easily be older than the surrounding woods, but it is clearly also clean and well cared for. It occurs to Jin Guangyao that it is not the type of place that is meticulously cleaned, but one that has never needed cleaning. He brushes away the strange thought as they approach, packs slung over their shoulders.
“Why did you want to come, anyway?” Jin Guangyao prods, and something shifts in Huaisang’s face. Maybe now wasn’t the right time to ask. He can’t have Huaisang get weepy from the start.
“Ah, well… Jiang Cheng always said he wanted to go with da-ge back then, but now with da-ge, and, well… I never took him either. I guess that’s why.” His voice peters out soft in the end as they reach the entrance.
When they knock on the front door, there’s no immediate answer, not even the telltale sounds of someone inside approaching the grand old entryway. Huaisang seems nonplussed, still lost in a bittersweet look, but as time stretches quiet in the dawn, Jin Guangyao begins to stifle the urge to fidget with a set jaw.
“Maybe they’re not awake yet?” he starts to suggest, just a little bit aggressive from being awake hours before dawn, just as the door creaks open inward to reveal the oldest-looking man that Jin Guangyao has ever seen. He naturally fits in with the ancient architecture, wearing clean white hanfu. As if for a funeral, Jin Guangyao’s mind can’t help but provide. He’s practically paper skin pulled over bird bones, with shockingly white hair, and wrinkles so deep they cast shadows over his eyes.
“Good morning!” Nie Huaisang chirps, the cheery sound out of place and a startling break from his previous demeanor, “We’re the spelunkers scheduled for today. I think we spoke on the phone? Nie Huaisang, and this is my friend Jin Guangyao.”
He pulls the permit out of his coat pocket to show to the old man. He doesn’t seem to peer at it, but shifts his gaze from Huaisang to Jin Guangyao.
A practiced smile pulls at Jin Guangyao’s face. Gooseflesh runs its course up and down his arms, below his sweater.
They stand like that for what must be ages, stares locked. Jin Guangyao shifts his weight between his feet. He braves a glance over at Nie Huaisang and sees a similar nervousness simmering beneath a veneer of determination as they wait for a response.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you. Sorry to have woken you up so early for this,” Jin Guangyao offers hesitantly, the silence stretching him thin.
Finally, the old man smiles at him, open-mouthed to reveal only toothless gums and darkness. He opens the door inward a bit wider, stepping aside to let them in. Jin Guangyao lets Huaisang lead the way.
They enter a simple parlor, the smell of incense thick. A single stick burns at a shrine in the corner. A small, low desk sits at the back of the room, where sits another man, maybe twenty years younger than the old man who let them in. He wears a similar set of old-fashioned clothes, this time in faded black. He smiles kindly at them, gestures them to sit.
“The hikers for today, I can assume?” he says, gesturing for them to sit. A still-steaming teapot sits to the side. He sets before them two glazed-clay cups, rough-hewn and glossy, and pours tea for them both.
Jin Guangyao hesitates. This isn’t at all what he expected from a guide house for a well-documented and popular cave, as Huaisang put it. Didn’t these places generally look more like science museums? The old-timey vibe, and the way he can’t see a single cobweb or patch of dust, like if it was all built yesterday, puts him in a state of irrational wariness. He can feel the decrepit old man’s gaze boring into his back as he scans the room, trying to locate precise evidence for the uncanny feeling.
But Huaisang sits with ease, takes up the cup and drinks, and shoots a side glance at Jin Guangyao. Right, right… if gentle Huaisang who unsettles so easily is comfortable here, then there’s really no reason to feel so paranoid. He sits and follows suit. Huaisang had several (mostly involuntary) cave expeditions with Nie Mingjue back in the day. It must just be his own nerves at the prospect of descending into the mountain, far from the sun and the surface.
“Thank you for the tea, sir,” Huaisang says as he finishes the cup, then pulls out the paperwork he’d brought along with their packs from the car. The old man in black looks over the permits, so long that Jin Guangyao begins to wonder if something is wrong with them. He gives Huaisang a questioning look that they’re both familiar with, but for once, Huaisang seems confident enough to not notice or return that glance.
The old man in black casts a glance over the top at Jin Guangyao, dark gaze lingering a hair too long. He knows that configuration of facial muscles anywhere—he’s appraising Jin Guangyao.
Jin Guangyao smiles back, taut as a catgut string.
The old man’s gaze shifts to Nie Huaisang for just a moment, then back to the paperwork.
“It all appears to be in order, sir,” he finally says to Huaisang, tucking the papers under the desk. “You’ll need to stick to paths with purple stones. And if you smell the ocean, leave. That’s all.”
Jin Guangyao can’t stifle the twitch of his lips and disguises his laugh as a cough. What? What kind of advice is that? Is this an elaborate prank?
“Excuse me, sir, but what do you me—” he begins, but Huaisang grabs his hand.
“We’ll keep it in mind. Thank you, again,” Huaisang quickly stands and ushers Jin Guangyao back to his feet. The old man smiles up at them and waves as the man in white leads them to the back room to gear up and begin the descent.
“They’re a bit, uh, you know,” Huaisang whispers to him conspiratorially as they dress, offering a small wink, “They were like that on the phone. I think it’s part of the gimmick. I heard they used to say this place was a well of magic or something.”
“Huh,” Jin Guangyao offers, and their conversation dies out as the old man in white fans himself in the corner, staring at nothing.
It isn’t anything like Jin Guangyao expected. Their path along the violet stones is easy and smooth, as though thousands of people have worn it down over the years, but that doesn’t fit with how remote it is, or how he gets the sense that they’re the first visitors in a while.
“It’s pretty easy, isn’t it?” Huaisang calls back.
“Surprisingly so,” Jin Guangyao says, though that’s not really true. Of course Huaisang would pick something easy like this. “Have you ever been to this one before?”
Their voices bounce off the rock in a way that makes Jin Guangyao flinch, every time. There is no privacy in these tunnels—while the walls are close around them, but still breathable, the crevices in the ceiling seem to extend up to the heavens, beyond the scope of the peak itself.
“Only once, but to be honest, I didn’t get very far,” Huaisang admits, and Jin Guangyao mulls that over a moment. Had Huaisang mentioned this expedition to him before? He wracks his normally light-footed brain. Huaisang always complained so vocally about each expedition Nie Mingjue had dragged him along on. Maybe this one was so easy, it hadn’t been worth mentioning?
“What was the name of this cave again?” he asks instead, determined not to show his hand. He can’t recall that Huaisang had ever said that, either. They cross a natural bridge through a waterway just a bit below them, their lamps illuminating the crystal clear water that flows quiet and slow.
“Careful—the water in caves like these is so clear that the bottom is way deeper than you’d think it is,” Huaisang warns instead, gently leading Jin Guangyao across the narrow way by the hand. He can’t help but be a little grateful for it, but he notes the clamminess of Huaisang’s palm.
His question from before gets lost in the awed silence between them as their path opens up into a grand cavern, littered with columns of mineral deposits, glittering quartzes in the darkness like ice. Several other paths open along the walls as they approach the center, climbing small ledges with care to the crystalline structures around them. Jin Guangyao can’t help the gasp that the sight pries from his mouth.
“Isn’t it?” Huaisang whispers. Everything has a strange lilac quality from the pathstones, pierced through by the clear white of their headlamps. Huaisang is setting down his pack to pull out a camera, fiddling with the settings before beginning to snap photos.
“Maybe I can see why Mingjue was always trying to get us both down here,” Jin Guangyao admits, quiet. Something about the space beckons authenticity from him. He misses the way Huaisang flinches, but looks at him in time to see his smile.
“He’d be thrilled to see us together here,” Huaisang agrees, and that’s when Jin Guangyao’s lamplight catches on something behind him, low to the floor, yellowed and small.
His eyes go wide, face contorting with shock, and when Huaisang turns around to look, he screams, short and shrill, almost dropping the camera were it not for the neck strap.
A human skeleton.
“Oh my god, Yao-ge, the way you looked, you scared me!!” Huaisang whines when he turns back around., smacking his shoulder lightly as he approaches the skeleton.
It’s small, but not a child. An adult, probably, but someone shorter. Tattered clothes still hang from the frame of it, some dark color long distorted by cave water. There’s still patches of… muscle? Tendon? Flesh? Some tenacious strings of hair cling to the skull. The ribcage is impaled on a small stalagmite. It’s been here a while, likely years, but not many.
“Did you see this the last time you were here?” he asks Huaisang, voice terse and eyes alarmed. Huaisang shakes his head, playing with the camera’s neck strap as he stares distantly down at the remains.
“No, no… I… don’t know who it is. I didn’t see it,” he says, looking a bit shaken suddenly. Jin Guangyao frowns.
“We should head back, then. Let the guides know. If it’s a missing person… but I can’t believe we’re the first to find them. This isn’t right…” he murmurs. Huaisang jerks his head away from the sight to peer at Jin Guangyao, expression complicated. Does he not want to leave, even after this?
“... Right. R-Right, we should go back and tell them,” he agrees absently, and takes off down a trail of purple stones without another word. Jin Guangyao startles, then follows him through the tunnel he charges down.
“Was this the one we came by?” he asks once he catches up, shining the headlamp about. The walls all look the same to him—oppressive now in this atmosphere, claustrophobic. Huaisang stops in front of him, so abruptly he almost runs into him.
“It… was…” Huaisang mumbles, and Jin Guangyao hears beyond his shoulder what the problem is.
The tranquil waterway they had crossed earlier now swells with rainwater trickling from the ceiling. Still close to the entrance, they feel thunder in their bones as they watch the water run fast and dark over the narrow path they had taken earlier, flowing perpendicular to the tunnel they stand in.
“We… can’t go back that way,” Huaisang says sheepishly, “and I’m not sure when the storm will let up, but even once it stops raining, it’ll continue like this for a while with the runoff.”
“So what do we do?” Jin Guangyao asks, voice more panicked than he had hoped. With every minute, his need to leave this place far behind continues to crescendo. He can’t help but think of Mingjue down here—what was he thinking, agreeing to this?
“Our best bet is to just follow our original route, out to the other side. We can let them know once we come out over there. That person… isn’t going anywhere any time soon,” Huaisang offers with a breathless laugh. Jin Guangyao stares unamused at the water flowing past them.
“... Alright. Lead the way, Huaisang.”
They continue in silence a long while, Huaisang leading them down through twisting tunnels and smaller caverns, following the glowing path before them. No runoff rainwater threatens them down this path—it seems the only considerable cracks in the mountain’s surface were above the first river, so they’re safe, Huaisang assures them.
It strikes Jin Guangyao again how smooth the going is. In the preparatory classes he took before this, none of the spelunking instructors mentioned anything like this. He wonders if it has to do with the cave’s formation, how the rock feels about as easy and even as walking down a pleasant hiking trail.
Eventually, the path widens back out considerably, and Huaisang pauses.
“We’ve made it.” Huaisang’s voice can’t help but broadcast his grin.
They enter a large chamber with a low ceiling, where the violet glimmer leads straight into a wide pool of water that stretches up against the far wall. No stalactites or stalagmites dare threaten its smooth surface—as they approach the shore, not even their footsteps make the water ripple. Jin Guangyao leans over the edge to see his reflection staring warily back at him. He shivers.
“Isn’t it gorgeous? They call it the Looking Glass, for obvious reasons,” Huaisang says, crouching and tenderly dipping his fingers into the water. It’s as though the water doesn’t even recognize it's been displaced. Jin Guangyao’s gaze flicks upwards. Huaisang looks peaceful, lost in thought.
“I’d appreciate it more if we weren’t stuck here,” Jin Guangyao admits. Huaisang shakes his head, lifts his hand out of the water and makes a show of flicking the water from his fingers.
“Don’t worry. Once we make it through here, we’re almost home,” he says as he starts gearing up for the dive, “This is pretty short, and straightforward. There’s only one tunnel underwater against that back wall over there, and it’s a straight shot, twenty meters and then you surface. I’ll go first just in case anything’s changed, but if I’m not back in ten minutes, that means it’s fine for you to come on through. I’ll be on the other side to help you out!”
Jin Guangyao suits up in his own wetsuit at the same time, fighting down every instinct that says not to dive into a pitch dark cave pond where he could well drown. He distracts himself by thinking what sort of favors he could work out of Huaisang after all this trouble.
Once they’re ready, Nie Huaisang gives him a thumbs up, then slips into the water like an eel. The surface stills immediately after, as if he had never entered, and he’s gone.
The silence and darkness has Jin Guangyao shift where he sits. The headlamp dimly illuminates everything, including the path of violet stones.
Ten minutes. He needs a new distraction.
He reaches up to switch off the headlamp.
His eyes take a moment to adjust, but—he gasps. Not only the violet stones, but tiny rocks of every color now illuminate the chamber, from floor to ceiling, speckled like so many galaxies. They glow by their own light, it seems, or maybe the absorbed light of the headlamp. Jin Guangyao doesn’t know. He’d been so sure the violet stones they’d followed had been artificial, installed by the guides to keep spelunkers on the correct path, but could they have placed this display in here as well?
The display reflects in the placid pond, its still mirror surface extending the depths of the room in such a way that gives Jin Guangyao vertigo just looking at it. He’s able to focus on the shadow breaking up the center of the water, small and dark, to keep everything from spinning.
It’s not a stone, he realizes a moment too late.
Breathing becomes difficult, like the air itself is trying to choke him. Jin Guangyao scrambles backwards, realizing the shape is moving closer, tendrils of black spilling out from the top to pool in the water around it. No ripples precede its arrival. The reflections of the lights, he realizes, are blotted out by a spreading dark cloud in the water.
Jin Guangyao’s heart hammers in his throat when he sees a pair of familiar golden eyes cut through the shadows of its face.
He swallows down a scream.
The headlamp switches on.
Nothing.
The stones resume their dull gleaming. The lake is still once more, clear as day, and empty.
It’s already time to go.
Oxygen deprivation, he tries to reason with himself. He’s feeling claustrophobic, that’s all. The skeleton from before—he’s just shaken. Huaisang said it’s just a little further, and they’ll be home free. He’s come too far.
He’s come so far.
Jin Guangyao approaches the shore again. Leaning at the water’s edge again, it’s remarkable how mirror-like it is, silver surface giving way to the clear depths of the pool. He places one testing foot in.
Blood explodes into the water.
A splitting pain runs up his skin, flesh, muscle, sinew, bone, ending where his ankle breaks the water’s surface. It rips a scream from his lungs that echoes loud in the chamber. He backpedals to find his foot is gone, his leg now ending in a bloody stump.
The loss of balance sends him plummeting forward into the water. Layer by layer the pain crescendos, skin peeling away to muscle to bone. He sinks like lead in the crimson water, flailing wildly, losing the grip on his breathing apparatus. Only screaming keeps the water from his lungs.
But he still feels whole.
He flips on his back as he sinks, looking up to the surface where bubbles pierce the surface. He’s about to swim back up when he sees it.
His reflection.
Clambering back on to the shore, baring its teeth back at him, bloodied and wild, hair loose.
It’s screaming something at him, so distant he can’t make it out but for reading its lips.
It falls back into the water after him, hands too solid and too real clawing at him in the strange lighting of the headlamp underwater. And Jin Guangyao claws right back, kicks like an animal in a trap, eventually shoves it upwards. It surfaces for breath, gasping without the same equipment Jin Guangyao has.
He braces his feet against the rock wall and shoots off like a desperate rocket towards the underwater tunnel, horizontal before him. He doesn’t even think. He keeps swimming, kicking as the pain sloughs off him. He doesn’t even realize that he still has his foot.
Then the tunnel branches. It’s pure instinct, he makes a left without a second thought. It branches again, he makes a right. It splits into three. He goes right again. It’s been further than twenty meters.
His lungs burn with panic as he comes to the axis of a wheel of shadowed entrances, all adjacent, spreading out like a star around a central chamber. He stops in the center, looking all around. He can’t even tell which one he came from. The whole world spins, and he realizes he is crying.
Desperate, he kicks up, helmet bumping rock a little too hard. He moves forward, tries again.
He breaks the surface, and there is Huaisang, leaning over the tiny pool he’s emerged from.
“Yao-ge!” he says, a tiny look of surprise on his face. Jin Guangyao gapes at him a moment, then scrambles onto the shore, away from the water. Huaisang helps hoist him up. He doesn’t realize how badly he’s shivering until Huaisang starts rubbing his arms helplessly.
“A-Are you alright? Did something happen? I’ve been sitting here for a while,” he asks, genuine concern writ clear across his gentle face.
Jin Guangyao gapes at him a long while, trying to find the breath in his lungs again, but it’s useless. What can he say? It sounds insane. More and more, he’s convinced they need to leave here, and immediately.
“There’s no gas trapped down here, is there? I’m—we need to leave as soon as we can,” he insists, shaking his head when Huaisang opens his mouth to speak.
“No, no, nothing like that. It’s such a well-documented cave, I practically went on a virtual tour before we came,” Huaisang insists, “Did you see something? Are you alright?”
Jin Guangyao thinks of the double, plunging into crimson water after him. Of that disembodied head in the middle of the lake and its piercing gaze.
Looking at Huaisang’s golden eyes staring at him so plainly, it strikes him how that was the one thing he and his brother had in common, after all.
He shakes Huaisang off of him and stands. His tongue swells dry in his mouth, heavy as lead.
“Let’s just go.”
Their path goes up a ways, after that, and the thought that they might surface again soon fills Jin Guangyao with a tenuous hope. They still follow the gentle glow of the stones, the hue and vibrancy of their purple metamorphosing as they walk. When the path slopes back down, though, he soon becomes concerned again.
“Don’t worry,” Huaisang assures as he picks his way down the path, almost as though he had seen the despair Jin Guangyao had failed to keep from his face, “The exit we were going to take anyway is closer to the base of the mountain. We can get cell service there and call for transport back up to the top.”
They emerge from the tighter tunnels to a larger chasm, and the path smooths out, a winding snake between two uneven drop-offs. Water runs somewhere far below them.
“Yao-ge, I was reading about these caves before we came here, you know,” Huaisang starts up as he leads the way. “Did you know caves form over millions of years? Before any of our ancestors could be considered ‘human’, the earth was parting itself to make these things. Can you imagine? Before humanity, civilization, language, there was this. And they’ll persist here after we’re long gone. To a cave this old, our entire lives are only a fraction of a millisecond. We’re here and then we’re gone. No one else will remember us, eventually, but the earth doesn’t forget.”
Jin Guangyao tries to stamp out the nervousness in his laugh. This isn’t the time for existential bullshit, he thinks. “Huaisang, you’re always so poetic,” he says.
“You think so?” he calls back, never once looking behind, “I’m just trying to tell the truth. That was always important to da-ge. And to Jiang Cheng, too.”
The wet dripping of the cave and their boots on the limestone sound like crickets.
“He thought you were poetic, too, you know. Jiang Cheng, of course. I’m sorry he can’t be here to tell you himself. He was always very straightforward. I admired his courage, in that sense. He would always be blunt when he decided to say something,” Jin Guangyao offers.
He remembers his brother-in-law fondly, too, but... It always felt as though he, just like Nie Mingjue, could see right through him. He just never said it if he saw anything.
(Jin Guangyao knows if he had seen it, he would have spoken. The accident was a blessing, then—a voice he did not have to figure out how to silence himself.)
“He was. Always made a strong first impression. The first time I met him… it was so warm for a spring night. Not cold at all. I remember, he scared me so much when I first saw him, he was so intense.”
Jin Guangyao’s eyes turn to pointed slits.
“Oh?” Jin Guangyao takes his water canteen from his belt. He holds it by the neck.
“Yes! Asking if I was—ah... The stars were beautiful. I’d never seen the stars—so beautiful…” Huaisang trails off, falling back to the silence of the cave.
“Didn’t you meet at Zixuan’s wedding, though? That was a summer affair, Nie Mingjue dragged you along,” Jin Guangyao says so casually. Huaisang flinches, laughs nervously.
“O-Oh, you’re right, you’re right, Yao-ge. Silly me. I think I was remembering the night we started dating? Ah, it was a while ago, you know,” Huaisang waves off, still a few steps in front of Jin Guangyao, back turned.
“Yes, I know,” Jin Guangyao says, and brings the canteen down on Huaisang’s skull with a resonating crack.
He crumples before Jin Guangyao, as though a puppet with strings cut slack. Jin Guangyao is breathing too hard; he can’t get enough of the stale, damp air in his lungs.
He stands there a long moment, hung in the air, staring down at the body before him as reality sets back in. Terror still clutches at his ribcage, its tendrils deep in his skull. He sees two images, almost as if overlaid atop each other, of Nie Mingjue’s similarly crumpled body, so small in death, and of his double above the surface of the lake.
His breathing begins to calm. It’s alright. It’ll be okay. Who is left to look for him? He’ll tell Xichen, there was an accident. Terrible, horrible. The rainwater washed him away. They’ll look and look and never find him. No one will know. Another secret to sleep with.
Then Nie Huaisang groans, and twitches, and every breath that Jin Guangyao had stolen is sucked right back from his chest.
“Yao-ge…” it croaks, “That hurt…”
He should have run.
“What are you?!” he demands.
The figure on the floor raises to its elbows, twists around to pin him with a look of perfect confusion behind the cave grime on its face.
“What do you mean, Yao-ge?” Nie Huaisang asks, the words forming slowly and carefully, barely above a whisper.
“You met on your first day of high school. I remember. Mingjue told me. You told me. And I saw what happens with the Looking Glass. What are you.” If his voice is shaking like the earth, Jin Guangyao can’t say. He just knows that the thing before him smiles bright in the dark.
“I’m Huaisang, of course,” it says so sweetly, “The Huaisang you spoil, the Huaisang you think is too air-headed to notice even obvious things, the Huaisang whose older brother you slaughtered when he got in the way.”
Fear seizes Jin Guangyao at the same time as clarity washes over him. It almost knocks him off his feet. Where can he go?
“I didn’t—”
“The earth doesn’t forget, Meng Yao ,” it says in that voice just like sweet little Huaisang’s, “Don’t lie to me here, and I promise not to lie to you again, either. So I’ll tell you this again: I am Nie Huaisang. I was there at your wedding, I was there when you were promoted by your father, and I was the one who brought you here.” It smiles, closed-lip and crinkled-eye.
“When. What did you do to him,” Jin Guangyao stammers out. His tongue is swelling. Why is it so hard to breathe?
It’s getting back up off the floor. Jin Guangyao steps back, quickly, but he knows there’s no getting away from it. How could he ever make it back up?
“I did nothing. He came here, after da-ge died. He didn’t tell a soul. He followed the path, just like the guides said. He dove headfirst into that pond, and then I was here. He walked into this cave, and I walked out.”
Nie Huaisang’s headlamp is cracked from the fall, the bulb failing and flickering. Its eyes shine like an animal’s in the light of Jin Guangyao’s lamp.
“Why did you bring me here.” Jin Guangyao fails to keep the shrill of panic out of his voice. He steps backward. It steps forward.
“We can make this easy, Yao-ge. It happens to everyone, anyway. Just sooner for you than others,” it croons like trying to talk a cat down from a tree.
Jin Guangyao spins on his heel and begins to run back upwards, following the violet glow, but he freezes in his tracks.
He’s standing at the top of the incline, bloody and damp and with stark white sclera and a terrible look on his face. He’s never seen himself like this before.
“I’ll kill you!” his reflection screeches. Jin Guangyao turns back to see Nie Huaisang holding the bloody canteen over his head.
Thump.
Jin Guangyao wakes to the kiss of grass against his cheeks.
He realizes with a start that he’s being dragged. When he opens his eyes, daylight burns at his cave-dark pupils.
He’s on his back. Looking up, he sees—something like the sky. It’s an uncanny facsimile of one, as though a green screen projection where the depth is just off. There’s sunlight arching through tall grasses and flowers that bend over him, but it feels just as cold and damp as stone. The air smells of brine—with an unsettling revelation, Jin Guangyao realizes that the sound of waves crashing against a shore grows louder and louder.
He tries to sit up, then realizes he’s restrained—looking down his legs and feet, he’s been bound by the caving rope they brought with them.
Grasping his ankles and pulling him through the tall grass is Nie Huaisang, who looks up with easy surprise.
“Oh, Yao-ge! You woke up. Just in time,” it says with a smile. Its eyes look like stone.
“Huaisang, let me go.”
It cocks its head to the side. “I thought you said I wasn’t Huaisang after all. Did you finally come around? I’m the only Huaisang left, after all. One of a kind.” It grins at its own joke.
“What are you.”
“You saw yours, didn’t you? Pretty freaky. But I can guarantee it was freakier for him, being thrust into existence like that. He was probably pretty panicked the first time, huh? Probably howled at first, like a beast? At least judging on how you looked when you resurfaced. But he’ll be fine, Yao-ge. I’ll make sure you get out of here, too. That way you can have a chance. After all, you’ve only just been born.”
“Me?”
“Oh, sorry. Not you you. Him. You.” Nie Huaisang grins, making perfectly dreadful sense.
Jin Guangyao can see it. Xichen opening the door to their home, welcoming it inside, making tea for it, letting it lay in his lap and combing his fingers through its hair. Panic finally rises, a slow boil in his chest. It’s hard to breathe.
He writhes like a dying snake, tries to kick at Nie Huaisang, but it’s hardly any use. He’s exhausted from the journey, his legs burning from the physical toll he’s paid, head aching and throbbing. At most, he gives it a minute before screaming, the sound echoing against the artificial sky. Nie Huaisang just shakes its head, as though he were a child refusing to go down for a nap.
“It’s nothing personal, Yao-ge,” it says, “Just that you’re the only scumbag I knew I could trade in.”
“Trade for what?” Disbelief runs cold in Jin Guangyao’s shaky breath.
“For A-Cheng, of course.”
A stone drops in his stomach.
“Jiang Cheng is dead.”
Nie Huaisang gives a laugh that borders on a cough, all wheezing and dust. “Yes, and? Death is hardly permanent, you’ve got to understand that. We can change it, you and I. That’s why I—why he—came down here after you killed da-ge. Except that time, I—we, I guess—didn’t know the cost. I don’t know what happened to him, but he didn’t come back out. I did. And A-Cheng… he turned out to be so sweet once I met him. He loved me, even when I didn’t remember everything right away. You could tell he loved me—him—for a long time. So when he passed so suddenly, I knew what to do.”
Jin Guangyao’s head is stuck two steps behind. “You replaced Huaisang.”
It giggles like it’s been given a compliment. “And you didn’t even realize, did you? Just assumed I was grief-stricken, on account of your own sins. But ‘replace’ is such an awful word, don’t you think? I am Huaisang. I’m the Huaisang who A-Cheng loves, and who loves him. And even though I didn’t know my da-ge like I should have, I think it’s fitting that he finally gets some justice like this, don’t you?”
Hot tears blur the vision of the sky as it passes in slow spurts of movement. Not like this. Not like this.
“You don’t even know why,” he tries to argue, “I had no choice—”
“And I don’t care to know,” Nie Huaisang cuts him off, “Do you think I care about ‘why’? Do you think either of those brothers cared about ‘why’? What makes ‘why’ so greater than ‘what’?”
“Aren’t you also justifying this? What makes your situation any different?!” he cries out. Nie Huaisang shrugs.
“I won’t pretend to be something I’m not,” it says simply.
“You’re a monster,” Jin Guangyao spits. Huaisang drops his ankles suddenly, straightening up to loom over him, casting no shadow.
“That makes two of us, Yao-ge.”
They’ve broken into a circular space of stamped down grass and wilted flowers. Nie Huaisang pulls Jin Guangyao onto unsteady feet, and already he begins to look behind them for a way out, but the meadows stretch endlessly. He doesn’t know how they got here. There’s no escaping this.
He looks down, and sees bones beneath the thatched grass.
Nie Huaisang gives him a little shove forward, and he stumbles. Something snaps beneath the grass underfoot. “Don’t be difficult, Yao-ge. We’re almost there.”
When Jin Guangyao looks ahead, he sees it then. A rectangle, maybe a meter wide, coming up from beneath the ground, piercing the artificial sky, so black that the light around it seems to dim. Its edges are sharp, as though the world were cut out to reveal its own backdrop.
Before it stands a boy, no more than five, with gentle gray eyes, playing with butterflies woven from grass.
As they approach, he looks up, and Jin Guangyao can clearly see him say ‘hello!’, but the only sound his little lungs produce is a horrible wheezing.
“Is this the gateway to the realm of the dead?” Nie Huaisang asks from behind him, and the little boy nods enthusiastically. Now that they are so close, the sound of the ocean is clearly emanating from this gate. Jin Guangyao can feel a cool, briny breeze against his face.
“Do you know who I’m here to see?” it asks again, and the boy smiles, turns to the pitch darkness, and reaches in.
When he pulls his ink-soaked arm back, he’s grasping an adult’s clean, unmarred wrist, and he pulls them forward just enough so that the unconscious face pierces the curtain of black.
Jiang Cheng.
There’s a little gasp behind Jin Guangyao. He can hardly process this himself. He’d seen Jiang Cheng, in the hospital, after the accident. The terrible state of his face, his body, his everything. He’d been there the moment the heartline had gone flat after a long, horrible night.
“Oh, A-Cheng…” He can hear the tears in its voice.
No.
‘What did you bring me?’ the boy mouths with a terrible sucking of air.
This isn’t happening.
A whisper in the shell of his ear. “Say hello to da-ge for me.”
A shove against his back.
He thinks of Xichen, asleep at home. Thinks of Mingjue, rotting in a cemetery.
Nothing but the sound of waves against the rocks.
Huaisang exits the cave to the red glow of sunset, a familiar weight slumped over his back in a fireman’s carry.
Trees stand proud where the guide house once was. Still, Huaisang nods slow and reverential to the darkening space between the pines, at the two pairs of eyes he can feel on his back. He walks to his brother’s old Jeep, and gently buckles Jiang Cheng into the passenger’s seat.
Sliding into the driver’s seat, he pauses, hands on the steering wheel. He stares down the car’s hood, out into nothing a moment. Takes a deep breath.
The headlights cut a path back down the mountain as night closes around them.
He finds Jin Guangyao on the side of the road, just before the highway. Jiang Cheng is still asleep. With his hitchhiker safely buckled in the backseat, he passes him a binder tucked under the driver’s seat chair, full of photographs and memoir.
“You’ll do fine,” he assures, smiling at the rearview mirror, “Xichen-ge will be so happy to see you home, safe and sound.”
It’s night. They’ve ditched their big graduation party to sneak into the park, giggling and passing the bottle of blue vodka between them, indirect kisses. They’re still in their formal wear, loosened and less oppressive, and only Jiang Cheng has the presence of mind to lay out a blanket so they don’t stain their clothes with dew and dirt. His mother would likely kill him, after all.
The stars overheard are gorgeous, Jiang Cheng thinks, but not nearly as gorgeous as the way they sparkle in Huaisang’s eyes.
“What was that?” Huaisang asks next to him, and he realizes with a blush that he’s said it aloud.
“N-Nothing!” he stammers, and steals the bottle back for another swig.
“Liar. You’re a bad liar, A-Cheng,” Huaisang giggles, rolling on top to kiss his mouth, sweet and burning from the liquor.
“You’re evil,” he counters weakly, and Huaisang laughs a bit too loudly, enough to get shushed.
“Nuh-uh! You haven’t even met my evil twin yet,” Huaisang teases, “You have to watch out for him. He doesn’t forget things like I’m willing to. And he’s hotter.”
“Impossible. You’re the hottest person in—the world,” Jiang Cheng mumbles, tongue loose with liquor. The way Huaisang goes pink in the night is worth it, though.
“Don’t lie, A-Cheng!” he whines, smacking his shoulder with no heat behind it at all.
“Why would I lie! Don’t accuse me of something I didn’t do,” Jiang Cheng protests. Huaisang rolls to his side, grabbing his boyfriend’s cheeks and squishing them.
“A-Cheng isn’t allowed to lie, starting now!” he declares, pushing Jiang Cheng’s face until his lips pout like a fish. Jiang Cheng grabs his hands suddenly, firmly, and holds them between them, silver eyes going steel in the moonlight.
“I don’t ever want to let go of you,” he murmurs, hoarse and low, watching the way Huaisang’s eyes begin to sparkle with some strange emotion, “I want to be with you as long as I can, then beyond that. I don’t want anything to separate us. Not your fancy art school next fall, or business school, or the entire country between us, or time. Not even death.”
Silence hangs between them, and before Jiang Cheng can react to Huaisang’s tears, his boyfriend is already burying his face in his neck with a bone-crushing hug.
“A-Cheng, you big sap…” he weeps into his suit jacket, and Jiang Cheng helplessly holds him close, face hot with his own confessions. Huaisang wipes his tears on his shoulder, and pulls away to look up at him, hopelessly drunk and in love.
“You know I feel the same? I’d follow you to hell and back, and then some. It’s a promise. No matter how we change, let’s never leave each other alone, deal?” he whimpers as vodka tears run hot down his neck. Jiang Cheng can't help tears he reflects back out of his overwhelmed heart.
“I promise. Together forever.”
In the dark of the bedroom, Huaisang gently wipes a small, ink-black handprint from Jiang Cheng’s wrist, and waits for dawn.