Work Text:
Bzzz.
The sound of his phone awakes him from medicine-inducted sleep. His eyes are still heavy, and it’s hard to reach out to silence the noise. It’s 4 o’clock in the morning. Recently, he can’t sleep well. Recently, he takes every opportunity he can to catch up with some minutes of delayed rest.
No matter who is calling him at this hour, Xie Qingcheng doesn’t want to pick up. His body is still warm underneath the duvet, limbs jelly-like. He thinks it’s alright if the call waits until morning comes.
Bzzz.
Bzzz.
The phone doesn’t stop ringing. This time, with eyes half-opened, Xie Qingcheng picks it up, bleary letters making name “Xie Xue” on the screen. His mind is still fuzzy when he tries to navigate the green icon for answering the call.
“Hello?” his voice is hoarse, but it seems that before even the last syllable sounds, Xie Xue breaks down into sobs. At first, he can’t understand her through the symphony of sniffles and cries. The words are cut-through and broken, and his senses sharpen only when he hears “dead”. At first he thinks it’s one of their old neighbors, sitting up straight, he is trying to make sense out of Xie Xue’s hysteric state.
“He Yu is dead.”
Xie Qingcheng doesn’t remember the last time when he was consumed with confusion this big. It feels like someone threw an ice-cold water bucket at him. He feels wide awake in a second. The hand he holds the phone in lowers slowly, until the device falls in between one side of the duvet and another. He can still hear Xie Xue sobbing, but the sound feels like coming from underneath the water.
A couple of seconds later, everything falls silent.
When he checked his phone later, Xie Qingcheng would see many unanswered calls from He Yu’s father, who eventually, forced with lack of response, decided to write him a message. [He Yu fell off the balcony tonight. His head injury was severe. He is dead.]
Xie Qingcheng feels nothing.
He always considered himself like nothing but a machine. There were tasks he had to fulfill and duties he had to do. As long as they still remained, he didn’t feel a need to dwell on his own emotions. Past cannot be returned nor it cannot be undone.
Xie Qingcheng doesn’t sit down and shed tears like Xie Xue does, he doesn’t respond to He Jiwei with a long text saying how sorry he feels. He doesn’t even think he feels sorry at all. He tells himself that it was to be expected; patients with mental ebola never made it too far.
But when he touches his lips that night, he feels a strange sense of ache, just as if he was bitten.
He goes on with his days, but avoids the busiest corridors of university; a gossip of such will never leave the students’ mouth too quickly.
Everything is alright, he tells himself.
Attending a funeral is like another duty to him, and he keeps himself at the distance. Even though He Yu never had many friends, he was quite popular. It is of no surprise that many people attended. Xie Qingcheng stays away.
It’s not the first funeral he attended and he knows it won’t be the last one.
His tattoo itches.
After the ceremony, he sends Xie Xue to their house and comes back to his empty dorm. He hangs the jacket and sits on the couch, and when his hands reach out to loose the tie around his neck, he tightens it instead; so much he coughs up when he realizes the lack of air. Nonsense.
He feels nothing.
His skull throbs with dull ache, but he blames it on how his routine was disturbed. He doesn’t want to admit to himself that his ears are ringing with the sound of shooting up gun. It was in the past. Although he regrets that he lost control back in time, it was not the reason for He Yu’s death. It doesn’t matter from what perspective he looks at it, he knows that it was the illness that took He Yu away.
He remembers the words he didn’t get to tell him, and fishes out the phone from his pocket.
[Dr. Xie, I’m sick.]
Sliding a finger, he wants to delete He Yu’s contact information, but cannot find the will. Before he registers, he opens the chat window.
[I will come back.] delete.
[That time, I really—] delete.
His phone ends up on the floor.
Dead cannot talk. Dead cannot reply, and Xie Qingcheng knows it better than anyone else. He loses the tie that not so long could almost choke him, just like He Yu did once. His fingers are trembling, slightly.
He doesn’t know why he feels the taste of wine at the back of his tongue, or maybe it is blood? It doesn’t matter anymore. All the unspeakable things He Yu did to him, whether purposely or not, are in the past. It’s not like he wanted all of them, anyway. The humiliation still washes over him like a summer rain at the mere memory, but his index finger travels to his neck and lips anyway.
He can almost feel the faint smell that fills the room, and feels completely ridiculous. He was definitely overworked recently, thus the weird thoughts. Thoughts that don't seem like his own at all.
He takes care of Xie Xue like always. He meets Chen Man and allows him to say many unnecessary things. They ask him how does he feel, but Xie Qingcheng doesn’t feel differently at all. There was always coldness in the place of his heart, unbreakable ice. He doesn’t allow anything to resurface beneath that frozen lake he made of himself. Even memories are buried deep within himself.
Only sometimes, when he lies awake, he seems to be hearing rash and heated up breathing next to his ear. The walls around him seem to be sobbing. Sometimes, he leans against the rail of his balcony, looking down at the backyard, counting the distance. He used to be a doctor. He knows the rest.
On the seventh day of He Yu’s passing, he sits on the exact same spot on the couch, both sleeves of his white shirt rolled up.
“Here lies one whose name was written in water.” like snake, on one wrist. On the second:
“Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change,
into something rich and strange.”