Work Text:
These days, Jing Yuan’s hands are always smudged with paint. Some of it has become a permanent fixture on the canvas of his skin, like the rivers of azure streaming through the valleys between his fingers or the specks of crimson that have made a home underneath his nails. Other shades are transient, coming and going on the whims of a brush—a dash of bright yellow sunlight tucked neatly into the crease of a palm, a stretch of green vines growing over a thumb.
Dan Heng often finds traces of these colors on himself and Ren, a physical trail left behind by Jing Yuan’s touch. Hardly, he has noticed, do they stay contained to the paintings they should belong to.
“You’ll get paint on your hair again.”
Fingers wrap quickly around a strong wrist, but by the time Dan Heng pulls Jing Yuan’s hand away from his bangs, the damage has been done. Black is mixed into the strands like stray shadows cast on snow.
Dan Heng huffs, already summoning a rush of water to his fingertips. “Lean back.”
“It would seem I got too distracted again," Jing Yuan says, obediently lowering the brush and tilting his head so Dan Heng can take a lock of hair between his fingers.
The attempt at sounding contrite is ruined by the amusement laced through his words. He's impossible—at this point, Dan Heng has seen all of the colors on the palette adorning Jing Yuan's hair one too many times for it to be merely accidental. Yesterday, the dissolved paint running down his fingers had been blue, and orange the day before that. Minute changes, all part of the same repeating script.
For once, it is a script that Dan Heng doesn't mind following. It takes his mind off of the reason why this spare room at Jing Yuan’s house has been turned into an art studio, why the amount of paintings lining the walls continues to grow and the smell of paint is always fresh and Jing Yuan spends more time holding a brush than not recently. It keeps him from wandering too far into that dark space where the echo of Bailu's words still haunts him.
Painting his happiest memories is a way for him to focus on them, to… overwhelm the negative inside his mind. It might help keep the mara at bay for a while, but this is still an experimental treatment — I'm sorry, Dan Heng, but I can't say how well it will work, or for how long.
“Would you help me put the rest of my hair up so it doesn't happen again? I'd do it myself, but—” Jing Yuan raises his paint-stained hands as if to say, It would only make matters worse.
You know you could simply tie it all up before you start, Ren had said last time, when he’d been the one sliding behind Jing Yuan, threading his fingers through petal-soft hair.
Maybe I prefer it when you do it for me, had been Jing Yuan's reply as he closed his eyes, leaning into the touch like a contented cat.
Jing Yuan does the same now, a happy sigh escaping his lips when Dan Heng rakes his nails lightly over his scalp. His body sags until his back rests against Dan Heng's legs. Dan Heng wouldn't be surprised if he fell asleep like this; it wouldn't be the first time.
As he spends longer than necessary untangling nonexistent knots, Dan Heng considers the faint stains of black paint on his own fingers. Yesterday, they had been blue, and orange the day before that. He hopes there will be another color to replace them tomorrow.
"This is new,” Ren observes next time he comes to the Luofu, running a hand over the large metal chest that’s taken residence in Jing Yuan’s studio.
He tugs at the lid. As Dan Heng expected, it doesn’t budge, same as when he had attempted to open it when he first saw it.
“It’s been there for a few weeks,” Dan Heng says. Then, because he sees the question forming in Ren’s eyes, “I’ve been trying to get him to tell me what it’s for, but he refuses.”
Jing Yuan does nothing to indicate that today will be any different. Instead, he chuckles at Ren’s annoyed huff. “All in due time,” he says, in the same unreadable tone used every time he denies Dan Heng an explanation.
Months later, Dan Heng will ask himself if it was sadness that he failed to catch in Jing Yuan’s voice. He will wonder if Jing Yuan had already known, as he pulled him and Ren away from the studio and into his bedroom, that he was losing the race against the clock.
He will ask a million questions and receive answers for none, but right now, he arches against the body at his back and swallows another’s gasp between his lips, and lets Jing Yuan leave a new trail of colors upon his skin.
People always talk about the concept of time. They talk about days, and months, and years, and cycles that start and end only to begin anew.
They never talk about the moments when it stops.
With the sleeve of a robe slipping off a shoulder, and lips halting on their journey down the slope of a pale neck. With a shaky breath exhaled into the air, and two pairs of eyes going wide while golden ones slip shut in quiet resignation.
It stops with the sight of ginkgo leaves trailing down Jing Yuan’s arm, curving around the bend of his elbow as if hugging the bark of a tree.
Ren still hasn’t moved his hands away from Jing Yuan’s waist. The way he trembles reverberates through Dan Heng’s bones even with Jing Yuan trapped between the two of them, or maybe Dan Heng is the one shaking, trying to stop the cracks tearing through his heart from spreading.
“When?” asks Ren. “When, Jing Yuan?”
“This morning.”
Ren’s Fuck, and you didn’t tell us? gets lost in white noise as Dan Heng takes a step back, feeling as if time is suddenly being fast-forwarded at a disorienting speed. He becomes keenly aware of the fading sunlight coming through the window. Of how many hours have passed since dawn.
“I’ll go get the healers,” he says, already reaching for his discarded shirt, but a hand stops him before he can yank it over his head.
“Dan Heng.”
There’s a heavy pause in which Dan Heng prays that Jing Yuan will not say what he knows he’s about to say next.
“The healers have done everything they can, and it is not with them that I wish to spend what little time I have left.” Jing Yuan sounds tired, the kind of weariness that settles bone-deep after a long fight, and yet his eyes still hold the warmth of molten gold when he tugs gently at Dan Heng’s wrist. “Please.”
It’s amazing, Dan Heng thinks as the shirt slips from his fingers and Jing Yuan pulls him into his arms, how, even now, Jing Yuan still manages to taste like comfort, to imbue every touch with reassurance like the sun casting its last rays before it dips below the horizon. If only there was a way to catch it in his hands—to keep it away from the darkness so that sunset can never come.
“Ren?”
The question sinks into the silence. Jing Yuan stares patiently at Ren’s unmoving form, hand outstretched, waiting for him to unclench his fists and raise his head.
Dan Heng has seen Ren shatter before. He has seen him come back from the dead, swallowing living breaths with a gaping hole in his chest, has seen his flesh knitting itself back together every single time it is torn apart. But the broken look he wears as he takes Jing Yuan’s offered hand—Dan Heng doesn’t think anything will ever be able to fix that.
”If you have something on your mind, just say it. I can practically hear you thinking.”
Ren’s voice rumbles where Dan Heng’s ear is pressed against his chest. Across from him, Jing Yuan stirs but doesn’t wake, burrowing further into Ren’s side and tightening his hold on Dan Heng’s hand as if he were trying to keep him close even in his sleep.
The gingko leaves have spread all the way to his fingers now.
Dan Heng keeps his eyes on them as he rolls the words he’s been mulling over in his mouth. “Kafka’s Spirit Whisper,” he begins tentatively, “It suppresses your mara, doesn’t it?”
“A temporary solution. One that is not foolproof, as you are well aware.”
Phantom pain pulses in Dan Heng’s chest. It’s a constant reminder of encounters awash in blood, tinged with a madness that Ren keeps balanced on the razor-sharp edge of a blade, the reason why he can never stay longer than a few days at a time before the scales begin to tip.
No, subduing the mara once it has settled in is not the same as getting rid of it.
“Still. Would it not be better than—”
Losing him.
Ren’s fingers twitch and the blunt edge of his nails dig into Dan Heng’s waist, signs of a silent war raging within. “Do you think I haven’t entertained the possibility?” he asks bitterly. “But what happens next — that is not our choice to make.”
What Ren does not say, because he doesn’t have to—not when they’ve both known it to be true from the moment Jing Yuan stopped Dan Heng from going to the Alchemy Commission—is that Jing Yuan has already made his choice, and there is nothing any of them can do to change it.
In certain ways, the following morning begins like any other. Sunlight makes its usual trek across the room, the sheets whisper the familiar rustle of silk when he stirs, and Dan Heng keeps expecting the finches outside to join in with their birdsong like they always do.
But this isn’t a morning like the others, and the finches have been silent ever since he woke up. His body isn’t weighed down by an arm slung over his waist. When he opens his eyes, the only one he sees is Ren, sitting alone on the edge of the bed. From this angle, the light throws the gray shadows sneaking across the latticework of scars on his back into sharp relief, a smattering of lingering ghosts from the night before.
Dan Heng leans forward to trace the paint lines with a fingertip, and Ren sucks in a sharp breath.
“Hey,” Dan Heng whispers. With Ren, they’ve always had to be cautious about unexpected touches. Careful not to startle him. Yet, this time, it takes but a second for him to relax, allowing Dan Heng to kneel behind him and wrap his arms around his stomach.
It is a quiet kind of solace. Dan Heng rests his forehead between Ren’s shoulder blades and times his breathing to the steady rise and fall of his chest, allowing himself a brief moment of reprieve before they acknowledge the empty space where a third person should be.
Then Ren says, “He was already gone by the time I woke up, but he left this.”
Dan Heng looks over Ren’s shoulder. The object in his hand is small, roughly half the size of his palm.
A metal key, smudged with paint.
Jing Yuan’s studio holds countless paintings of memories from years long past. Dan Heng has spent so long looking at them that he could conjure them up in his mind if he wanted to, from the folds and creases of the High-Cloud Quintet’s clothes to the exact shade of blue Jing Yuan used for Mimi’s eyes.
The paintings inside the chest, however, are ones he has never seen before.
“That sentimental fool,” Ren snarls, as if the string being stretched inside of him since yesterday has finally snapped, and Dan Heng hears the distinct sound of something breaking.
He does not turn around. Instead, he pulls the paintings out of the chest one by one, lining them up against the wall. Here is Ren, caught in a rare smile; there is Dan Heng, reading a book under the shade of a maple tree. Dozens of moments they barely paid attention to, all of them captured with painstaking detail by Jing Yuan’s brush.
The last one sits in an empty corner of the chest, almost as if it was intentionally kept apart from the others. Its brushstrokes are wilder, less precise. It shows Dan Heng curled up against Ren, mussed up sheets pulled up to their waists, both deeply asleep despite the golden tinge of dawn coming through the window.
Unlike the rest, this memory is fresh like the paint that stains Dan Heng’s hands when he picks up the painting, still not completely dry.
Sentimental fool, Ren had said. A stubborn one, too. How difficult had it been for Jing Yuan to cling to sanity long enough to paint this, to capture the last of his happy memories before walking out to meet his fate?
Dan Heng swallows around the lump in his throat. In this studio where Jing Yuan’s presence is still so vivid, so recent, his absence seems a hundred times louder and a thousand times heavier, enough to choke the air out of his lungs if he allows it to.
He should have been prepared. It was bound to happen, he knew that—they all did. Bailu said it herself that all they had was an experimental treatment to stave off the inevitable. It was never a cure.
And yet, that knowledge doesn’t make it hurt any less.
Setting the painting next to the others, Dan Heng sits beside the knocked down easel, amidst shards of a broken palette and brushes scattered across the floor. Ren joins him once he’s calmed down, back leaning against Dan Heng’s, his cursing turned into painful, ragged breaths.
Dan Heng closes his eyes and takes in the smell of paint and the metallic tang that always seems to cling to Ren’s skin. Like this, he can almost pretend this is just another day of hanging around while Jing Yuan paints, waiting for the moment when his fingers will inevitably make their way to his hair and leave a new dash of color behind.
Eventually, Ren will have to sneak out of the Luofu again, before the wrong person finds him and spreads word of a wanted criminal aboard the ship. Dan Heng will have to go to the Seat of Divine Foresight and talk to Yanqing to find out the details of what happened after Jing Yuan left.
But for now, the outside world can wait. Dan Heng examines the paint drying between his fingers, clinging to the corner of his nails. Molten gold shimmering in the sunlight.
If this is the last shade to ever color his skin, he is glad that it is the one that reminds him of the comfort held behind gentle eyes.