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It started late on a summer night, hours after he’d said goodnight to Lan Zhan, his husband slipping off to bed while Wei Ying kept scribbling away at his tablet. Insomnia was such a bitch, but he’d had enough years to know it was better to just stay up and ride it out. Trying to force himself to sleep never worked out, he just got frustrated and made the whole bedroom environment way worse, ended up resenting the room itself.
It was almost one in the morning when something in his stomach gave an unpleasant twist. He gave a soft huff of a grunt, caught off-guard by the jab of surprisingly sharp pain, thoroughly knocked out of the focused state he’d managed. He pulled out his earbuds and sat back from his computer, lacing his fingers together and flexing his wrists, pulling his arms back high above his head and listening to his spine and shoulders give a series of little, crunching pops. It was enough to bring him back to full awareness of his body, pushing up and heading to the bathroom. Empty his bladder, wash up a little--
He didn’t feel sleepy so much as just out of it, which was why he was so startled when cold water came down onto him, drenching him through. Standing in the shower, still dressed, blinking quickly as the cold deluge shocked him out of his vague daze. “Fuck--”
He smacked the water back off, stripped and toweled himself dry, baffled. Sure, he could do some weird things without thinking about it when he was really hyperfocused on something, but usually that took the form of putting something in his mouth that he shouldn’t (the wet end of a paintbrush was usually the worst offender), or making noises that he didn’t notice until Lan Zhan pointed them out (usually because they were setting off his misophonia, unfortunately.) Never something this extreme. He could only assume it was a perfect storm combination of the tail end of insomnia-fatigue, being broken from a fixation spell unexpectedly, and the vague physical discomfort that was still hovering in his abdomen, somewhere right below his ribs.
Wei Ying had always retreated to water when he felt bad, after all. A hot shower when he felt ill, throwing himself in a backwoods creek when he was stressed, even just staring into the reflective rain-slick surface on the street after a rainstorm was a soothing distraction sometimes. He’d grown up basically on the water, so it made sense enough to him.
Successfully convincing himself to forget about the weird one-off, his eyes burning with the desire to stay shut, Wei Ying finally hauled himself to bed and curled into his deep-sleeping husband’s side. He was asleep in minutes, the whole incident put well out of mind.
***
The second time was two weeks later, in the middle of the day while Lan Zhan was at work, and was considerably worse. It started small--just a hot, sharp prickle just below his ribs, somewhere back near his spine. He was stretched upwards on a step-stool, fucking around with a light fixture over the sink, and nearly dropped the frosted glass cover for the LED bulb he was in the process of screwing in. He set the small glass dome down on the counter and had enough time to back off the stool, get his feet on the floor, hissing a bit at the weird sting in his abdomen. Then it went off for real, the painful tingle blooming into a deep, white-hot stab, lancing from the bottom of his sternum straight back into his spine, like a rod of pain had been driven through him from one side to the other.
He managed a strangled little yelp and he was down, crumpling onto the floor--more from surprise than anything. His pain tolerance had always been stupidly high, enough that Lan Zhan had been upset with him more than once for accidentally hiding serious injuries (he hadn’t known they were serious! He was used to it, it was fine!) It was absolutely nasty, like he’d swallowed a hot coal and it was searing the top of his guts, but it was mostly how suddenly it had come on that stole his breath and left him propped against the kitchen cabinet, eyes squeezed shut, teeth clenched. Surprise, and the sensation of pressure, like something inside was forcing things apart to make room for itself to grow.
Realistically, he knew he should be worried about that. His breath came in short bursts, diaphragm spasming, riding it out. He should definitely go get his phone--once he could get up, anyway--and let Lan Zhan know something was wrong, should probably go to the hospital. It was probably a very bad sign to feel like there was a growing pool of acid in his middle, making his chest hitch if he breathed too deeply.
But it was only a couple minutes, and then it faded, tapering off until all that was left was a small, dull ache, a mild tingling beneath his sternum. As the pain receded, so too did Wei Ying’s determination to do the responsible thing and let his husband know he wasn’t well. After all, it was just a couple minutes, and as he got himself back to his feet, he felt fine. Maybe ever so slightly shaky, but hey, he probably just needed to eat something. Maybe his blood sugar was crashing again--that was always fun.
Besides, hadn’t he read before that sometimes heartburn could be so bad that a person would think they were having a heart attack? Acid reflux was serious shit for some people. He’d never really dealt with it before, but that was just what it was like to get closer to thirty--all those health things started crawling out of the woodwork. He’d just down some antacids, pay more attention to what he ate (yeah, sure, he would totally manage it this time), and that would be that.
A plan of action in mind, Wei Ying resumed re-assembling the light fixture, satisfied that he had everything under control.
***
Almost a month of no sudden stomach upset had Wei Ying convinced he’d figured out the problem. Added some daily antacids to the list of things he had to remember, and that was that. All good, another dumb aspect of the human body successfully managed. No need to bring it up--Lan Zhan probably saw the new addition to the medicine cabinet and figured it out anyway, he was so smart and observant--and definitely no need to worry about it anymore.
Which was why the abrupt shock of tight, stabbing, burning pain that woke Wei Ying up at four in the morning caught him so off guard that he actually bolted upright. Unfortunately, he’d been folded comfortably into Lan Zhan’s arms at the time, and the sudden jerk shoved his husband back and sent Wei Ying himself tumbling off the edge, hitting the floor with a dull thud. Lan Zhan was of course awake immediately, righting himself in confusion, peering over the edge of the bed with a disoriented frown.
“Fine--I’m fine--” Wei Ying managed to choke out, even while his insides were squeezed by a tiny burning star, bursting to life right below the bottom of his sternum. He wheezed for breath around the acidic force compressing his lungs upwards from below, shaking harshly as he managed to get himself sat upright against the side of the bed, head pressed back against the edge of the mattress. Ignoring his attempts to convince him it was all right, Lan Zhan slid down and wrapped one arm around Wei Ying’s shoulders, a hand pressing flat against his chest.
Wei Ying’s heart was racing, his lungs were trembling, but it just hurt--that was all. Bubbling, boiling, burning pain that really sucked and was making it hard to breathe, but it wasn’t like he was gonna die. He patted a trembling hand on Lan Zhan’s shoulder, gripping on, using his husband for leverage to push himself up on shaking legs.
“I just gotta--” He staggered, and Lan Zhan was upright with him immediately, holding him steady. “I just gotta--” He gestured vaguely for the bathroom. He felt like he was going to spit up a vat of cartoon acid, like something out of a Ninja Turtles toy ad. Careful of his stability, Lan Zhan walked him into the bathroom obligingly. Headed for the toilet, which normally would have made sense given how much Wei Ying felt like he was about to retch, but he shook his head. He didn’t really know why himself, but he pointed to the shower, stumbling that way and almost tripping into it.
Confused but obliging, his wonderful perfect husband lowered him to the floor of the attached tub, even started the water down over him. Wei Ying was glad he hadn’t bothered to put anything on after their every-day the night before, nothing in the way as the water hit his skin and ran down. He didn’t care that it was cold--that was better, even, with the way it was burning inside his stomach.
Drenched by the shower’s spray, letting it gradually warm around him, the pain faded away. It was slower to ease back, but it did eventually, Lan Zhan sitting next to the tub and holding his hand, watching him calm down in silent worry. Still a bit groggy from having his sleep interrupted, the poor thing. Wei Ying was lucky. If Lan Zhan had been more put together he’d probably have already bundled his suffering husband into his car and taken him to the emergency room, and that would be embarrassing as hell, waiting around just to get told that he had bad heartburn. Rolled eyes from busy ER nurses who had better things to do than tell a guy he needed to knock off the super-spicy foods, he wasn’t nineteen and invincible anymore.
The pain faded all the way back to just a slow, throbbing ache in the pit of his stomach, and he sighed, reaching out and turning the water off. Ran his hands through his hair to wring the water out a bit, pushing himself up to grab a towel, offering Lan Zhan a reassuring smile.
“Wei Ying,” the man murmured, standing and watching him, concern darkening his soft-tinted eyes. Wei Ying just smiled broader, patting his shoulder with a damp hand.
“I’m fine, Lan Zhan,” he assured him, bright and airy as he dried himself off with quick swipes. He draped the towel over his shoulders, letting his wet hair drip into it. “Just been getting some wicked heartburn lately. I guess the spicy stuff’s finally coming back for revenge, huh?” A little laugh, a shake of his head. “I’m gonna be up for a while now, I think. Go back to bed, okay?”
Lan Zhan was not convinced--what about heartburn made him stumble into the shower, exactly?--but he allowed himself to be quietly shepherded back into bed, covers drawn up over him. His long-held routines won over within minutes, and Lan Zhan was asleep once more. Wei Ying gave him a final kiss to his forehead, then pulled on some lounge pants and ambled out of the bedroom. He made no attempt to get any more sleep that particular night.
***
After that, the pain became a constant. Low-level, nothing spiking quite like that, but the dull throb never quite went away. It was easy to put out of his head, to promise himself he’d bring it up the next time he got around to the doctor--tragic as it was, that particularly nasty reflux had probably done some kind of semi-permanent damage to some important lining, somewhere in there. Or maybe he had an ulcer, those were supposed to be really bad too. Either way, it was unpleasant, but nothing worth making a special trip for--people lived with ulcers or reflux or whatever every day. It was one of those sucky things about the body, parts that just went wrong for no good reason and there was nothing to really be done.
Sometimes it got worse, of course, because life could never be all that cooperative. A harsh jab that would make his breath go short, make his heart pound for a second, interrupting whatever he was doing with a nasty shock of pain. He couldn’t say for sure--internal nerves were notoriously bad about referred pain, you would feel something in one place but the actual problem was somewhere else entirely--but he thought maybe it was spreading wider. It had been consistent before--right below the bottom of his sternum, back towards his spine. He was pretty sure, anyway. But the longer the ache continued, with those periodic flares of brighter, hotter fire, he thought it might have sort of spread downwards, leeching through his guts in a slow, nasty spread, like a poison seeping gradually through his abdomen. It was was a slow, sneaky thing, took months before he actually noticed.
It finally gained his attention during a late autumn morning, brushing his teeth and staring foggily into the mirror. Lan Zhan had already left for work, bright and early as ever, left him with a goodbye kiss that hadn’t really woken Wei Ying up so much as just colored his dreams with something fuzzy and warm. He was self-aware enough to recognize that his reflection did not look particularly good. His face had a bit of a pallor to it, a heavier shadowing around his eyes than usual, making the soft gray look slightly haunted. He hadn’t felt like his sleep had been particularly poor quality, or anything, but maybe--
And then the distant ache in his abdomen burst into a full burning star. He dropped over the sink with a shocked wail, toothbrush skittering away somewhere on the floor, the edge of the counter digging into his hips as his back bowed, shoulders rucking up. White-hot acid boiled from its familiar place below his sternum, sizzling in a hellish stream all the way to just above his hipbones, the entire expanse of his stomach wrenching with a horrifying surge of agony. It felt like something was twisting his guts inside of him, like a nest of snakes had tangled amongst his organs and was constricting them all. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t even manage a wheeze, as the muscles all around his middle locked into a wicked squeeze that forced all the air out of his lungs and refused to let it back in.
He dry-heaved into the sink, stomach clenching and throbbing but pushing up nothing. Black spots floated in front of his eyes as his compressed lungs screamed for air, his head spun like he’d been knocked across the back of the skull. He pushed away from the sink and fell sideways, scrabbling desperately across the floor tiles until his shaking hands found the side of the tub--hauling himself into it by pure adrenaline and force of will, his muscles alternating between jerking tight and going slack, totally out of control. Through desperate pawing, he managed to get the tub faucet on--couldn’t manage the little flip-valve that would switch it over to the showerhead, but he was able to knock the drain closed, so cold water started to fill the tub around him.
Gradually, laying in the rising water, the pain eased down to something he could tolerate. His insides un-knotted, relaxing by degrees, until he could at last snatch a breath. Slumped against the wall of the tub, he didn’t know how long he laid there--listening to the water spill into the overflow drain that kept it from running onto the floor, too dazed to turn it off. Eventually, the cold finally did sink in, reach him--and he twisted the tap shut, opened up the drain and crawled out, spilling himself limply across the bathroom floor. He pulled a towel down off and just tucked it around himself, too drained to stand and dry properly.
By the time he was able to get up, see himself dried off and dressed, it was almost three in the afternoon. He was lucky he’d gotten everything back under control before Lan Zhan came home--he didn’t want his husband to panic, seeing him like that. He definitely needed to get to the doctor.
But he was terrified of what he might be told. With how dramatic that one had gone--and how he still hurt, kind of a lot actually, a steady glow of pain spread in a band from sternum to hips--it had to be something real, something serious. He’d watched plenty of daytime television, he knew the sort of scary medical shit that could ruin people’s lives--what if the doc told him he had some sort of horrible cancer? What was he supposed to do about that? Could he even afford to do anything about that? He was already freeloading off of Lan Zhan quite a lot, even if his magnificent and honorable husband would never call it that; medical things like that cost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands--he couldn’t ask for something like that. Put Lan Zhan through all that, put himself through all that.
In the end, the fear of what kind of answer he might receive convinced him to put it out of his mind. Maybe that was a one-off. Maybe it would never happen again. Maybe the lingering burning in his stomach was the worst he’d ever have to deal with now, and he could totally learn to ignore that just like he’d learned to ignore all sorts of other things throughout his life.
By the time Lan Zhan got home that day, Wei Ying felt mostly recovered. A bit pale, a bit shaky, but he was able to wave it off as just general under-the-weather feelings. Good thing he still hadn’t brought up anything about the constant pain in his stomach, or Lan Zhan probably wouldn’t have let him off the hook so easily.
He went to bed early that night.
***
Wei Ying knew he was worrying Lan Zhan by now, but so far he was getting away with saying he’d probably picked up a bug, just wasn’t feeling quite right, just hadn’t slept well. As fall crept into winter, the pain got slowly, steadily worse. The tiny star in his abdomen was consistently brighter, day by day, a sizzling fountain of acid always trickling down through his guts that ate at him constantly. He pushed it to the back of his mind, over and over again, and forced a big smile that his husband frowned at every morning.
His reflection in the mirror was pale, the hollows around his eyes deeper and darker, even though he’d been sleeping kind of a lot, actually. More than usual. He felt pretty sapped of energy, focus more shot than was normal for him--hadn’t managed any real, steady work on any projects, either creative or home-related, for a bit. And the more the little star in his stomach gnawed at him, the more his appetite tanked, because it was pretty difficult to force anything on top of the acid-bath that his guts had become. He got nauseated pretty easily. He wouldn’t be able to hide it all from Lan Zhan much longer, but every day he managed to keep his husband from sitting him down and trying to actually capital-T Talk about what was wrong was one more small victory.
He just didn’t--he didn’t want to go and be told the obvious. That something was really, really wrong. That he was probably--that he was probably--
No, he wasn’t going to let that become the rest of his life. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want everything to change like that, turn into a series of hospital visits, of test results, of counting things down. He’d talked enough with his husband, and with Lan Huan, to know that had happened to them once already--the slow, dragging process of saying goodbye to their mother every day, just in case it was the last one-- He didn’t want it to turn into that. He probably wouldn’t have a choice, soon, if it kept on like this, but he was going to put it off as long as possible. Keep things normal as long as possible.
(He could mock himself for saying there was anything normal in sleeping for more than twelve hours a day, eating barely one meal, and hiding in the shower all the time because it was turning into the only place he felt sort of okay-- He could mock himself, but then he’d have to admit what he was avoiding thinking about, and he wasn’t thinking about it, so there.)
He stumbled through one day at a time. Maybe it was a seasonal thing. Maybe once things started to warm up again, he’d start to feel better.
***
“Really, Lan Zhan.” He smiled, hoping it was convincing and not a total wreck, leaning against the door frame. “Go, see your brother, I’ll be fine.” Winter was fully on them, and even if they didn’t celebrate any particular named holidays, it always felt like a time to catch up with everyone anyway. Normally, Wei Ying would be delighted to go with his husband. Lan Huan was a pleasant guy to be around, and making Lan Qiren’s eyebrows twitch was a fun pastime.
He just really wasn’t feeling up to it, with his guts tight and hot, the little star in his stomach pulsing in time to his heartbeat. Maybe he’d feel better later and catch up with them. Or another day. There would be other opportunities, it’d be fine. He just needed to rest up a bit more. (He’d been in bed for twenty-one hours already, but maybe just a little more.)
“Wei Ying.” Lan Zhan’s brow furrowed, and he pulled his husband in tight, squeezing him. “You have been unwell for months. You need to speak with a doctor.” Ah, he’d finally given up on the meaningful looks and telling silences.
“Aah, it’s fine, Lan Zhan, it’s fine.” He waved his wonderful partner away, grinning. Lan Zhan’s expression darkened into something almost a glower, but he stepped back, out onto the front porch.
“When I return,” he said, his voice soft but allowing no argument, “we will discuss it.” His eyes swept up and down, taking in Wei Ying’s tight stance, the way his simple around-the-house clothes hung a bit too loose on him. “Rest, Wei Ying.” Then he turned, heading for the car in the driveway, snowflakes drifting sparsely down around him.
“Bye, Lan Zhan! Tell Lan Qiren I’m sorry I couldn’t make it!” he said, waving brightly, and closed the door. As soon as the barrier was safely between them, he slumped, allowing a taut groan to shake out of his chest. He turned and shuffled away, heading for the bathroom, the shower again, his one little refuge. He was fucking their water bill up something fierce, but Lan Zhan hadn’t said anything about it so far.
His foot hit the threshold of the bathroom, the tiles cold despite the heat in the house, and the little star went supernova. Molten lava erupted inside his guts, burning everything away in a rush of incomprehensible sensation too far gone beyond his limits to even register as pain anymore, knocking him insensate so badly he didn’t even know he’d hit the floor.
His vision came in spotty bursts, telling him he was laying curled up on his side next to the side of the tub, body crunched in on itself as tightly as he could get. The rawness in his throat told him he’d probably been screaming, but he couldn’t actually hear anything beyond the rushing, pounding in his ears--
So it wasn’t something he heard but something he felt when the vat of acid in his guts surged intensely and some surely very important part of him somewhere in there cracked. A horrific, grinding crunch, as the wrenching, twisting grip in his abdomen forced something so hard that it actually broke him. A disgusting hot swell in his stomach made him spasm and choke and heave, gagging out a thick mouthful of blood, so dark it was almost black, splattering across himself and the bathroom tiles.
Oh, that’s probably not good. He stared at his own blood splashed across the floor in a daze, distant and confused, and then heaved again with the same result. The writhing burn in his guts twisted this way and that, the nest of snakes inside him all turned furious and hateful, pressure mounting up--he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t move, he couldn’t think--
There was another crack, somewhere higher maybe, and everything went black.
So black. So dark. Wrapped tight around him like a vice, squeezing him, crushing him. It pulsed, hideously alive and horribly wrong, trapping him inside a cage of soft and hard and throbbing mess. He had to get out--had to get out, had to get out, had to get out--
Wild, desperate, flailing, he shoved against the blinding darkness, gathered himself against the bars of his wretched prison and threw all the strength he could muster forward. Thrashing, battering the binding walls around him, mad to be free, to be out--
The cage gave way, splitting apart. The dark gave way to blinding bright, far too bright, a whole new kind of torture as he fell forward into the open air, so much colder, so much harsher, so much worse--why had he wanted to get out, no, this was worse, this was worse--
He slapped the wall of the tub and could almost cry, madly scrambling to climb in. Spotty awareness robbed him of the details of how he got the water turned on, switched to the showerhead by some magnificent feat of dexterity that he couldn’t recall doing, and the water fell down around him in a comforting hiss, soothing away the harsh burn of the far-too-much, running cold over him and washing away the awful mess.
Dazed, relieved, almost delirious with the realization of--hey, it doesn’t hurt anymore, the hurting stopped--he passed out in the tub.
***
Lan Zhan could not focus.
Visiting his relatives was normally a bit of an up and down experience. His brother could be counted on to be relatively soothing, the majority of the time. One of the few people in the world he did not have to go out of his way in any particular manner to communicate with, attentive enough and close enough in experiences to read his moods and meanings without the need for effort on Lan Zhan’s part. His uncle was... not quite as accommodating, but he was accustomed to the way Lan Qiren saw the world, and Wei Ying’s influence over the years had assisted him in learning to bow considerably less to his uncle’s more unreasonable expectations. He was much more tolerable in these smaller doses, and their relationship had stabilized into more of a mutual respect since it had become clear that Lan Zhan was, in fact, his own self-actualized person, not an abstract figure to realize Lan Qiren’s desires of what a perfect nephew should be.
The times when Wei Ying were absent were actually, on the whole, a bit smoother--as long as they were careful not to discuss him beyond a general assertion of his wellbeing, as Lan Qiren was easily brought into such undesired topics as Wei Ying’s continued unemployment, as if his artistic endeavors had no value due to being freelance--but normally he would be missing due to more innocuous reasons. A conflict in schedule, most commonly, a deadline he had to meet or his irregular sleeping patterns putting his current bedtime right in the middle of their chosen meetup. Not because Wei Ying was deeply ill, trying to hide it, and had been for an extended period of time.
Despite the appalling show of bad manners, Lan Zhan found himself slipping his phone out of his pocket during a lull while his uncle stepped into the kitchen. His brother looked him over quietly, saying nothing--had, of course, already picked up that something was amiss, but was declining to pry just yet. He waited until Lan Zhan had composed a simple text message to Wei Ying-- I apologize if this wakes you, but I wanted to check in that you are all right. I am worried. --before inclining his head at his younger brother’s phone.
“Is Wei Ying well?” he asked softly. Lan Zhan gave the faintest hint of a breath, and a very tiny sideways nudge of his head. No. Lan Huan’s gaze lowered down to his hands, folded neatly in his lap, and his usual default smile had a touch of worry haze over it. “You have been distracted.”
Lan Zhan tucked his phone away, gaze focused on no particular point of the low table in between them. “He has been ill for months. He avoids the subject,” he murmured. A bit of tension crept into his older brother’s shoulders.
“Perhaps you could excuse yourself a bit early,” he suggested gently. “I am sure Uncle can forgive it just this once.” Their shared experiences led to the same wariness that Lan Zhan felt on such matters. If Wei Ying was not successfully hiding all the signs of whatever was wrong, it had to be particularly bad. The man was far too good at concealing when something was amiss.
It made Lan Zhan deeply uncomfortable to break off their tiny gathering early, but after a short consideration, he gave a shallow nod and rose. His uncle would be angry, but he would be able to apologize to him properly later, once Wei Ying was seen to. With a soft goodbye to his brother, and quietly implied thanks for the encouragement to go and see to his partner’s needs, he stepped out of his uncle’s home, and hurried to the car.
The drive home felt far longer than normal. He couldn’t even say why, but his anxiety rose steadily as he approached the house, as if things would somehow have suddenly gotten far worse in his absence. Most likely, Wei Ying was asleep, and no more ill than he had been when Lan Zhan left. But something in his chest had tightened with fear, and he had to brake harder than usual to make the turn into his driveway, speed having crept up higher than normal on the quiet streets.
He hurried into the house, shoes and jacket removed with quick efficiency. He was bizarrely tempted to call out, as though he was rushing in for a rescue--to let Wei Ying know that he was there, that he had come back for him. As if his husband wasn’t probably just tucked up in their bed, hopefully sound asleep.
He refused to let himself run across the house, approaching their master bedroom suite at a quick but acceptable pace, even the strange dread deepened in his chest. The bedroom door stood open, the bed visibly empty. The bathroom door was shut, and beyond it he could hear water running--the shower, again. Wei Ying had been retreating there frequently, finding comfort in the falling water. It was concerning, but still counted as Wei Ying being right where he was supposed to be, in that way.
“Wei Ying, I have come home early,” he called in, so that he wouldn’t startle his husband unnecessarily. He walked up to the bathroom door, but the only sound inside was the steady noise of falling water. The tight anxiety in his chest gripped harder.
“Wei Ying?” Still nothing. No answer. Had he fallen asleep in the shower? “Wei Ying, I am coming in.” Every action felt overly telegraphed, like he’d slipped slightly to the left of himself, watching from the sidelines as he put his hand on the doorknob, turned it, and pushed inward on the door. It swung forward about four inches, then hit something on the floor in front of it, and stopped.
Lan Zhan could not hear the sound of the shower over the roar of his own heartbeat in his ears. His breath was caught in his lungs as he stared down at the bare sliver of tiles revealed by the inward swing of the door. The white bathroom tiles were stained red. So very, very red, wet and shining.
He thought he might have said something, called Wei Ying’s name again. He pushed the door, and the obstruction slid inward slowly, revealing more tiles, all splashed with red. His eyes rose slowly as he worked the door open enough to see the room beyond, staring expressionless, frozen cold, his ears ringing.
The room was red. Splashed across the tiles from wall to wall, raw, organic red, dark and rich and shining and reeking of copper. It had sprayed up the walls and over the sink, up the side of the tub. It had soaked the hanging towels and ruined the roll of toilet paper. There was so much.
The thing he’d pushed from in front of the door was--the--it--
He didn’t really consciously know that he’d stepped into the room. Standing on the red, tacky, thick red. Wei Ying was--not--Wei Ying was--the--he--
From slightly to the left, Lan Zhan processed the twisted figure that had been splayed up against the bathroom door. With no other option but to deny, his mind observed, processed, and dismissed the information before him. The vision of Wei Ying, split from collarbone to hips, ribcage cracked in half and spread open, everything in his abdomen apparently scooped out and just--done away with, for there was nothing there. A hollow space, black and red, and red, red, so much red, the entire room had been painted red. His Wei Ying was--
He took a step backwards. Back toward the door. He needed to--call someone. Something. He needed to-- something. Anything. He didn’t know what was happening. He had seen nothing. It was--this was not real. This had not happened. Things like this did not--
Something grabbed him, latched around his leg, and he twisted, tried to bolt. Slipped and swung--would have crashed to the floor, the red floor, but another--something--another something caught him, around the chest. Pulled him back, stumbling. Into the shower.
The cold water pouring over him, drenching his clothes, shocked him out of the numb state and he made--some kind of noise, he could not probably describe it. He was in the shower with something and it had its grasp on him, in the bathroom full of the gore that was remained of-- And it latched around him, squeezed him hard. Wrapped around his leg, his chest, it was--something solid black, shimmering with a rainbow undertone like an oilslick, sliding over his skin in a wet glide, clinging onto him powerfully. Long--arms? Limbs, near formless, just a mass of blackness and--
Noise in his head, loud, unbearably loud, a cacophony of--voices, sounds, pouring into him through his skin, as the--thing--drew him deeper and deeper into the writhing mass of tentacles that was all it seemed to be, twining all around him. Voices, shouting, words overlapping in a mess, feelings--emotions?--rushing with the force of a whitewater river, overwhelming him, drowning him in so many things too fast to process--terror, confusion, excitement, adoration--?
But over the churning mess of just sheer noise, a single thought managed to break the surface of the bubbling morass, pressing the gibbering tide of other voices low enough that he was able to actually discern one thought amongst the rest of the chaos spilling into his head,
Lan Zhan! Lan Zhan! Lan Zhan! Lan Zhan!
The thing--it had to be the, the whatever it was, shouting at him, into his head--it knew his name, it knew his name and it was shouting it like a triumph, like an accomplishment--shouting it in--screaming it into his brain--
--in Wei Ying’s voice.
And gradually, the volume was tapering down. The shouting background crowd of voices muffled into almost-silence, and Wei Ying’s voice--Wei Ying’s voice?--reducing to something that didn’t deafen, struggling under control. The battering tide of emotions slackened, no longer pumped through any place the... limbs, touched him, turning into a trembling tension that he knew was there, just on the surface of his skin, but no longer forced upon him.
The tumult had completely removed his ability to process--anything. Lan Zhan did not, could not, know what was happening. The sequence of events was impossible. The being that was wrapped around him was impossible. The corpse on the bathroom floor was impossible. Everything was impossible.
Lan Zhan. Singular. Like Wei Ying was talking to him, trying to get his attention. Standard volume. But inside his head, passed through his skin. Lan Zhan. Hey. Hey. Lan Zhan.
He couldn’t say why, but he found himself answering, his voice strained and shaking, “Wei Ying.” The sliding limbs around him shifted. One tangled into his hair and slid through it. As they turned, he saw lighter spots amidst the black--spots. No. Eyes. Open, round, staring at him, silver eyes, scattered amidst the thicket of tentacles.
Yeah. Impossible. Wei Ying was impossible. This was impossible. I don’t know what happened.
“Wei Ying. Is,” Lan Zhan tried, but he didn’t know how to end the sentence. Because Wei Ying was a mess splattered across the bathroom floor. And Wei Ying was--
Yeah. Um. The emotions bubbled up a bit higher, volume increasing as--Wei YIng?--attempted to process. Panic. Confusion. Relief? Concern. Then they were pressed down again, carefully re-contained. That--I’m not doing that on purpose. Um. Lan Zhan, um, I. I don’t know what the hell happened.
“Wei Ying,” he repeated. “Wei Ying. Is. You, are Wei Ying.” The thing in the tub. An oilslick-rainbow mass of slithering limbs, tangled around him, coating his skin and clothing in some sort of... substance. Wei Ying--was--
Yeah. I’m. I’m Wei Ying. Still, the reply passed through where they touched, and Lan Zhan managed a short jerk of a nod. For lack of any other options. Everything had gone impossible. I guess--I guess, um, this--is, uh--why I was sick. This... whatever.
Lan Zhan nodded again. A single minor gesture. Then his brain decided it would be best if he was unconscious for a while.
***
What followed was a sequence of challenges for them, mostly Wei Ying, to overcome. First off, the room where he--changed? Hatched? Whatever he called it, it looked like a murder had happened. Wei Ying thought he would have been more freaked out, seeing his own body (former body) in a post-exploded state, but it was sort of... Well, he was still him, and the thing splattered on the floor was just. A bunch of meat, really. Which gave him the really unfortunate idea that he knew exactly how to clean up his own mess.
Repeatedly, Wei Ying was finding that he just knew things that he had no business knowing. How to move around like this. How to deal with the horror scene in the bathroom. How to talk to Lan Zhan, although he’d sort of messed it up at first and he felt very badly over how he’d just sort of screamed at his husband for a few minutes there until he got it all under control.
His poor husband. Lan Zhan really, really did not deserve to come home early and see all this. Wei Ying was still recovering from... whatever had happened, or he would have absolutely tried to get it all cleaned up before his husband could see something so gruesome. As it was, Lan Zhan was still out cold, which was probably for the best. He’d gone a little bit nuts there for a second, grabbing him like that, but--well--he was still getting used to... whatever this was.
(Maybe he shouldn’t be accepting it so easily? But the alternative was probably gibbering madness forever, and he didn’t really want to do that. Acceptance seemed like a better option.)
Coordinating his... everything... was still very tricky. He had the textbook knowledge in his head--er, mind. Brain? He didn’t have a head. He didn’t know if he actually had a brain. This knowledge-from-nowhere had a lot of... gaps. Anyway. He had the instruction manual, but putting it into practice still required a bit of trial and error. Thus why he’d sort of accidentally molested Lan Zhan when he meant to just tug him away from the mess so he didn’t have to look at that horror-show any more. Almost threw him on the floor. If he’d been able to say something out loud first that would’ve been great, but he didn’t seem to have vocal cords?
So it was with slow, careful movements that he finally turned off the shower--he didn’t want to, instinctively he knew that water was good, which given how... slimy... his skin was, made sense. (Like an amphibian? Was he an amphibian? Was this basically just a tadpole becoming the worst frog to ever exist? He was pretty sure amphibians had bones. Wei Ying now definitely did not have bones.) He turned off the shower and pulled himself over the side of the tub, cradling Lan Zhan in his... general mass. He hoped whatever the hell was coating his tentacles (ha ha ha, he had tentacles, this was stupid, he’d decided now, this was stupid) didn’t stain, because he had absolutely drenched Lan Zhan’s clothes in it.
Awkwardly shuffle-sliding across the blood-slicked tiles, he removed his husband from the bathroom. He expected crawling across the bedroom carpet to feel nasty, but other than how little puffs of lint stuck to him, it was... pretty unremarkable, actually. So that was good. After some hesitation, he decided to strip his husband down, because his clothes were... probably ruined, maybe, unless the stuff washed out okay. He tried to be careful about it, but, well--still learning, and his limbs were strong despite how thin each one was individually, and he ended up popping most of the buttons right off of Lan Zhan’s shirt. Oops.
One arm fished under the bed until he pulled out the spare linen box, pulling out--careful not to touch anything else and get everything in there all slimy--a spare blanket, using that to wrap Lan Zhan up to try and prevent the bed from getting too messed up. Then he draped him on the mattress, leaving him there to recover from the nasty shock, and pulled himself back into the bathroom.
Okay. Task: Clean up his mess. It would be worth laughing over, if he could laugh. It was surprisingly unsettling, being apparently incapable of making a sound. He grabbed his... remains, pulled the corpse into his central mass. Somewhere in all his mess of... him, there was something that was... analogous, at least, to a mouth.
His understanding of his own anatomy was very abstract. The blueprints that this transformation apparently came with were not very thorough. Everything was just kind of... part of him, undifferentiated. For a human brain, he knew, the different parts of the body were very specifically mapped to different spots--and larger processing power was dedicated to the most important ones, like hands. For... whatever he was now, it all seemed to be given completely equal weight, making it very difficult to actually tell what part of him was what, or if he even really had distinct parts at all. He honestly seemed to just kind of be a big mess of limbs all clustered around one central... orb? It was hard to tell.
He had an awful lot of eyes, but they were all on sort of an outer ring and he wasn’t sure how he was processing what they saw, and he couldn’t really see down into the mess of his own limbs because they were crowded so closely together at the roots. He could hear things, but he didn’t know by what method? And touch and taste and smell--a lot, actually, probably too much information all coming in at once, but fortunately “how to filter all this out” was part of the default plans, or whatever it was that told him what he was doing with this alien body.
Alien. He was probably an alien. That was a thought distracting enough that he didn’t really need to try and figure out how he kind of... stuffed his own corpse up and into some kind of--mouth, maybe, somewhere in the center mass. No crunching. No jaws or anything. Just... jammed it in and gone. He was probably an alien. Had he he been an alien the whole time? Or was he some sort of body-snatcher who thought he was Wei Ying because he’d assumed him when he grew inside him?
That was not a train of thought to follow. He was Wei Ying. He... he was Wei Ying. He was going to stop thinking about that now.
Well, now the body was gone. The blood was more annoying, but not any harder--with the right focus, his tentacles could just kind of... suck it up. It left a layer of slime behind, which was probably also not good if someone decided to do some sort of forensics test on the bathroom, but didn’t send up the same kind of immediate alarms as seeing a bunch of blood everywhere. He got it all off the tiles easily. Getting it off the walls was a little more challenging, since it had kind of... soaked in a little. But he plastered himself up against it and gradually he was able to seep it out of the invisibly tiny crevices of paint where it hid, drawing it up and out. He was pretty sure his slime kind of removed it, actually? Maybe that was part of what it did? He hoped he could figure out a way to be less... well, slimy. That could lead to difficulties.
The fabric items were a lost cause. Given what had happened with the clothes still on the body he’d eaten--that being, they were apparently just gone--he just repeated his disturbing trick, making the ruined towels and toilet paper and most of the little odds and ends that had been totally soaked just... go away. Maybe that was a bad idea, but, well, bad ideas were generally his specialty, so.
Once he had all the blood out of the room, he had a go at figuring out his whole... self. Did he have... needs? Like, water, maybe? For the time being, he didn’t feel any absolute need to get back into the water, just a kind of vague want that seemed non-urgent and optional, as far as he could tell. Funny, having to learn an entirely new suite of internal senses, and he’d never even been very good at his old ones.
(Maybe he wasn’t good at them because he was an alien? That sounded stupid. No, he was pretty sure he just sucked at managing himself.)
He heard a shuffle in the other room. He had no idea how much time had passed. He wasn’t good at keeping track even at his best, so now he had absolutely no hope. Didn’t matter, anyway. What did matter was Lan Zhan. And not terrifying Lan Zhan. He really needed to be able to talk to him without touching. Talk to him with a door between them, maybe, so it was all a little less... much. He wasn’t exactly a looker now, being a. Thing, whatever he was. Lan Zhan had seemed... pretty upset, the bits and pieces he’d--involuntarily, he was not trying to pry into Lan Zhan’s head--seen flashing over where they connected. Not that it was fair to judge on when he’d been panicking and dissociating and generally falling apart because he just saw Wei Ying’s horrifically mutilated dead body.
Well. Hey. Maybe he could. If he was a telepathic alien, what couldn’t he do? Other than go through an airport. Oh hell, life was going to have to resume at some point. Maybe Lan Zhan could stuff him in a backpack. He wasn’t actually very big, discounting all the tentacles. His middle point was like, a basketball? Maybe? Which made him wonder how he’d stuffed an entire adult human body into his maw, or whatever it was, but he probably shouldn’t question that stuff. Alien and all that.
Anyway. Communicating. Never his strongest skill! But he had to focus. Also not a strong point of his. He pointed his attention at Lan Zhan, stirring in the bedroom, probably still very upset. Maybe even more so, as he had to be questioning what parts of that nightmare were real. He needed to talk to Lan Zhan. He wanted to talk to Lan Zhan. He wanted to talk to Lan Zhan without scaring the shit out of him by jumping all over him like a clingy cat.
Lan Zhan. A beat. Keep focus. More shuffling. Lan Zhan. Can you hear me? Focus. And don’t be too loud. No screaming in his husband’s head.
“...Wei Ying.” His husband’s voice on the other side of the door. Was he answering, or was he just calling out to him because he wasn’t sure what was happening?
Lan Zhan. Tell me if you hear me, okay? He really wanted to touch him. He’d felt that when Lan Zhan had walked into the bathroom the first time, a startlingly strong current while he was still reeling from waking up as a... whatever, overwhelming. Wanted to grab him, hold him, wrap himself around him and not let go. Not that he didn’t crave that sort of thing normally, but it was really strong now.
“I hear you, Wei Ying.” Success! He was a telepathic alien! He probably had to be very careful not to broadcast too much, actually! He didn’t need to go shouting random bullshit into Lan Zhan’s head! “Wei Ying. Are you... all right?”
Just peachy. It was really hilarious, how actually honest that reply was. Sure, he was some sort of tiny cosmic horror with a thousand eyeballs and a bottomless void for a stomach, but other than that? It was nice not to be fucking in pain anymore, for one thing. Just, uh, y’know. Confused. No idea what happened, really. Other than I guess I’m. An alien? I’m going with alien.
Lan Zhan made an interesting sort of noise from behind the door. There was a stretch of quiet between them. He wondered if he could read Lan Zhan’s thoughts at a distance, too. Not that he wanted to invade his privacy that way. But if Lan Zhan could answer him in total silence too, that would be good for keeping Wei Ying’s whole... existence, on the down low. Again, stuff him into a backpack kind of plans.
“Wei Ying... is Wei Ying.”
Lan Zhan really was too good. They would figure this out.