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These days, the Astral Express and the Stellaron Hunters seem to cross paths more often than usual. Interpreting fate lies in the jurisdiction of the latter, so Dan Heng figures every sudden appearance of his archenemy in some sporadic corner of the cosmos must be captured in a grand script, branding them un-sudden and un-sporadic.
Really, the glimpses he catches of Blade are just that: glimpses. As far as Dan Heng is aware, it isn’t yet time for their destinies to collide in a manner so dramatic, and perhaps that’s why it feels like they are tip-toeing around each other in a slow dance across the universe, as if to savour resentment’s bitter taste from afar before it boils over in the spill of a white-hot reunion.
The temporary stop that Dan Heng walks alone is a planet frozen over and too cold to sustain many lifeforms. Stelle and March, too, had split up to tread two other planets in the same solar system in search of maintenance supplies for the Astral Express’ many confusing mechanisms. The three, as well as Himeko and Welt, keep careful and frequent contact through their phones.
Apparently, this unnamed planet is one of the many that carries an ore that’s capable of fusing with the Express’ exterior to replenish it. Pom-Pom didn’t quite explain the details, moreso flailed their arms around to exclaim that the Express was in dire need, considering they’ve been crashing into quite a few miscellaneous things lately. Sunday, who usually stays out of these disputes, was incredibly keen on emphasizing the crashing part.
The ore can be found on the outermost surface of this planet, which means the mission should be easy at best and inconvenient at worst. It’s a little more than inconvenient when a Stellaron’s effects intensify the frigid planet’s blizzards to a near-extreme, and when Dan Heng can feel an aching chill course through the bracer on his wrist. Two signs that should have cushioned his surprise upon coming across a small, sheltered cove with Blade’s body collapsed inside, but Dan Heng seems to lack foresight when it comes to the biggest constant in his life.
He’s yet to make any progress in his small retrieval mission, but his legs already propel him into the shelter on instinct. The cove has stone walls that just barely block out the suffocatingly cold air outside.
His instinct is usually to run. To be the one who seeks shelter. But today, it is Blade who jolts into consciousness when he’s approached by Dan Heng, as if alerted by the sound of a prowling predator.
“You’re here alone?” Dan Heng slowly treads towards the body shivering beneath him, pelted in snow.
“You’re here alone?” Blade sneers through gritted teeth. It’s a more valid inquiry than Dan Heng’s. It’s also a sign that Dan Heng’s appearance wasn’t in his script.
Dan Heng dares not ask what happened. The remnants of some kind of avalanche are scattered in obvious clumps outside the cove, a long stretch of white without either of their objectives in sight. Blade doesn’t respond well to concern. Or to many things Dan Heng does, really.
There are wet trails of frost and blood along the cove’s entrance, showing a story of Blade dragging his broken form to collapse here, pitifully waiting to regenerate as he always does. Dan Heng wonders if he also keeps in contact with his companions during missions. There’s a device around Blade’s wrist that might indicate it, but it shows no signs of being functional.
It does astound him sometimes. The idea of Blade being someone who is taken care of by others. Someone who has a home to return to after all of this. Welt promised to cook Dan Heng hot soup after his retrieval mission, he remembers.
He’s caught staring at Blade’s form when the two make eye contact heavy enough to shatter Dan Heng’s ribcage.
“If you want to be useful, hurry up and use your Cloudhymn on me.”
“…I didn’t inherit any of my predecessor’s healing magic. I’m sorry,” Dan Heng mutters.
Blade pushes a scoff through the chatter in his teeth. “Your existence is more worthless than I thought.”
Dan Heng’s phone buzzes in his pocket, but he pays it no heed. He abandons his companions’ worries for someone who is even more of a cause for concern as far as Dan Heng’s wellbeing goes.
But there is something different about this encounter. Blade is dying slowly; not in a frenzied rush to cut down his resentments like a sword slices stars, but in a quiet and almost fearful retreat like a wounded animal licking at its gashes. He’s pushed himself against the stone wall, curled up and snarling. It must be instinct’s work, a body’s need for survival fighting against a person who has no desire to survive.
“Leave me alone,” Blade groans, hands reaching up to rub away the cold along his arms. The rubbing soon turns into clawing. “I will die regardless, and my body will reset itself.”
“I won’t let you die,” Dan Heng insists in sheer impulse. He knows he sounds naive. He knows it’s pointless to keep the undead alive.
A low, gravelly laugh escapes Blade’s throat.
“You already have,” Blade’s eyes glaze over with the past’s misgivings, every line on his face carved with bitterness.
Dan Heng is used to bearing his blame. He hardly flinches. They’re a few metres apart, and he tries to move closer. “If you believe the state of your body is my fault, allow me to warm it for you. I won’t run away.”
“You think I’m not used to dealing with my own aftermath?”
He manages to grab ahold of Blade’s shivering hand, with fingernails growing bruised and blue by the second. Blade’s breathing grows slower and haggard, gasping for the chilled air engulfing their surroundings like a frosted blanket.
Dan Heng watches terror slowly cross Blade’s face, a perpetual ghost awaiting its chance to strike. A violent shake overtakes him. He’s losing himself to instinct.
“It… feels like her,” Blade twitches away from Dan Heng’s touch once, then twice, before he gives up to the whisper of warmth trying to bring him solace. “When she… So many times—”
Wary of the state of Blade’s mind, Dan Heng breaks through their thick barrier of animosity and consumes Blade into a warm embrace, trying to pull him away from memories and the mara that might come with it.
He knows not the details, except that Jingliu has delivered Blade death in the form of blood-stained icicles and bone-chilling karma until cold became the only feeling he knew.
The chill of Blade’s body shoots into Dan Heng’s bones, like he’s absorbing the agony into himself.
Blade’s mouth keeps spurning an incomprehensible mess, until it arrives at, “Taking… All you do is take from me…”
“Don’t think of it that way. I’m… giving you myself, aren’t I?” Dan Heng stumbles his way through delivering comfort.
Abruptly, Blade thrashes about within the embrace he’s trapped in. His hands begin to claw at the buttons around his chest, struggling to pry open the fabric in a hurried daze.
In a blur, Dan Heng sifts through his mind whatever lessons Welt might’ve given him on hypothermia. Such a nuisance, that all of his past life’s medical knowledge has escaped him. He painfully recalls the time he tried to give Stelle CPR even after determining she had a pulse.
“Wait!” Dan Heng grips his wrists, tighter than intended. “Ah— your mind must be tricking you into thinking it’s hot. You’ll get colder if you do that.”
Blade snarls at the concern. “Can’t you see they’re wet?”
“...Oh— right. Yes.”
Throwing aside the shame of misinterpreting something so simple, Dan Heng wastes no time stripping Blade down to just his undergarments and the soaked bandages lining his chest and limbs. He inevitably peels off the bandages as well, curiosity betraying his self-control, wanting full insight into the broken body he himself had reforged in a past life.
Cracked and crooked scars keep Blade’s body in a living purgatory. Dan Heng can see Jingliu’s traces in the phantoms of pain littered across his form, Baiheng’s traces in the buried grief lying dormant behind eyes that have forgotten her smile, Jing Yuan’s traces in the useless way he’s been cast aside to rot in his own rage. Dan Feng’s traces in the horror of his existence. Dan Heng thought he might’ve been lucky to have only one shadow, but he’s long since acknowledged that Blade is a horrid amalgamation of all of their ghosts. Despite it all, Yingxing’s traces seem to chip away with each time that amalgamation reconstructs itself anew.
He takes off his own coat and layers it atop Blade, feeling a deeper chill crawl into his skin, then presses their bodies together once more. He simply hopes his Vidyadhara blood can protect him from the extreme cold.
Muscles twitch and ripple in instinct beneath Dan Heng’s touch. Eventually, Blade ceases to run his mouth entirely.
He’s seen Blade seeping grisled blood at his feet as a fresh corpse, seen Blade struggling in the trenches of his mara, seen Blade in his silent and rational. He’s seen Yingxing in his dreams. He’s somehow seen every part of Blade, even though all of their encounters have amounted to nothing but brushstrokes of hatred and remorse.
He’s seen every part of Blade, except for the part that lays bare and vulnerable beneath him, just some layers of cloth away from intertwining flesh. Dan Heng has gotten Blade to lie down, splayed atop him like a cloud shrouding a starless sky. The cold body within his arms eventually stops moving.
Awkwardly, Dan Heng mumbles, “Blade. You’re… still alive, right?”
There’s a small, slight stir beneath him. Blade’s right arm shifts out of the coat’s shelter, stretching to the side.
“Cold…” Blade mumbles, apparently coherent enough to scowl into Dan Heng’s face. “You’re cold, Yinyue-jun. Spare me your concern. I would have let you die in an instant.”
Engulfed in the same temperature for so long, Dan Heng failed to notice the tip of freezing metal prodding against his side. He apparently didn’t keep track of where Blade’s right hand was veering off towards, nor where he kept his sword.
Indignation bubbles in the scrape Blade is marking on Dan Heng’s torso. “You wouldn’t. You said Elio’s script requires me to be alive.”
Some tense moments pass where Dan Heng stilts his breath, keeping his eyes locked on Blade’s unwaveringly. Any sudden movement could prove dire for him, and all that can be relied on is Blade’s sensibilities.
Blade is a person of reason. Dan Heng understands this much. No matter how many crazed chases and murderous swings have been directed his way, Dan Heng can feel the cold logic behind each of Blade’s strikes. Natural consequences, an eye for an eye; it's terrifying when a tool knows its worth.
He makes a slow maneuver to set some distance between them, lifting himself to perch on the ground between Blade’s legs. Blade’s eyes remain fixated on Dan Heng’s shifting form, but his sword doesn’t follow.
“Good. Stay away,” Blade’s gravelly voice is sour and dry.
But Blade begins to shiver once more in the few seconds they spend apart, his flesh always craving to drag them both down into shared purgatory. The grip on his sword falters when his fingertips harrow with frostbite once more. Metal clangs to the ground. Blade’s lips stubbornly try to hide the quiver overtaking. He reeks of pride.
“You need me. It’s best you don’t deny it,” Dan Heng’s tone turns commanding, coming naturally to him in a way he can’t describe.
“You used to say that all the time,” Blade’s shivering lips curl into a resentful smile.
It’s nothing Dan Heng can confirm or deny. Blade’s shattered memory is possibly an inaccurate painting of the past’s grand landscape; there are mountains of misinterpretations and rivers of remorse that could muddle his view easily.
In the distant and detached dreams he experiences of their shared past, he can only recall treating Yingxing kindly. Maybe his own biases are blurring that perspective. Maybe there is no correct way to gaze at the picture of a misty landscape, when neither can remember the carps that used to swim in the ponds or the lotuses that bloomed at night and shrunk at dawn.
He wants to remember the exact moment he destroyed Yingxing. Maybe then he would know why it isn’t possible to look ahead towards a new horizon together, instead of forcing a home in the same desolate picture they’ve buried.
“Tell me what else he used to say or do. I can soothe you better if I know what you’re familiar with.”
“There is no comfort to be found in familiarity, Yinyue-jun.”
Blade keeps shivering. The deeply woven urge to blanket himself over Blade pounds against Dan Heng’s chest again— the sliver of draconic instinct within him wills to conceal away and guard what he treasures. It’s inescapable that Blade was once something he treasured, akin to the way a patriarch keeps fine silver around his neck.
Counterintuitive to his desires, he peels his coat off of Blade, exposing to the harsh elements a body that is suffering from their wrath. Dan Heng’s hands brush across the scarred torso rising and falling in shallow breaths. Blade has abandoned all struggle; his muscles grow rigid at the touch, but he allows it all the same.
Maybe, he’s beginning to realize that it’s always been him and Dan Heng. Sharing every sweet and bitter sip of liquor on their lips, sharing glimpses of the moon past midnight on their stolen nights, sharing warmth through the twin bracers on their wrists. Sharing the people that were dear to them. Sharing sin and sharing punishment.
But Dan Heng doesn’t share his resentments. In the broad horizon of sorrow, Blade sees the cruel glow of the moon, and Dan Heng only sees a cloudy night in drifting peace.
Let’s search for a new moon, Yingxing. Let’s gaze at it together, a voice that isn’t his own echoes in Dan Heng’s head.
Dan Heng’s hands wander to string away what remains of Blade’s clothes. He watches that powerful form flinch violently, a freeze seeping into what has been delicately revealed.
Primally, Dan Heng shields away what he’s exposed of Blade, pressing clothed hips against bare ones and securing his reign over the body beneath him.
Blade’s eyes are shut. He tries to laugh, but it falters in his throat. “I already let you take everything from me. Are you asking for more?”
“I want to keep you warm,” Dan Heng reminds him.
Blade doesn’t know what to do with himself. The hardened curve of his thighs brush against Dan Heng’s sides until they squeeze, lighting a dangerous fire in Dan Heng’s chest, a burn to keep them both warm for days on end. To Blade, there is no way to go but downwards, and Dan Heng might just be eager to follow.
“I know… I know what I’m doing. I know how to handle you best. Don’t be so stubborn when someone is trying to take care of you, Blade.”
The words feel like they’re carving through centuries he’s never lived and shooting through his mouth without his permission.
Hair slides like silk past his shoulders. Scales ripple along his arms. Horns sprout from thick black. An ocean envelops him, and Dan Heng is reborn. His heart thunders distantly in his chest.
He discards his pants and adorns only the silken robes gliding off his back. He feels regal, so unlike himself, like a small boy costuming a mighty dragon. But maybe the face of royalty is what Blade will find acquaintance with.
Two clawed fingers meet Blade’s naked torso. Blade sucks in his stomach at the prick.
“I will leave you alone if you ask once more,” Dan Heng scours the body beneath him, soaking in every curve of Blade’s muscles. “But I won’t run away. I’m your shadow as much as you are mine.”
Blade’s mangled bosom, on precarious display, tells him a tale of blame. He merely sighs. “What does it matter? Your cruelty will go punished one day. Take what you need.”
Dan Heng sees more hope in his eyes than hatred.
Desperate to keep that glimmer of hope painted on Blade’s forlorn face, Dan Heng pushes into him gently, a shrivel of longing crawling into him where it should not. It’s met without struggle. Once he is rewarded with that small taste of Blade’s warmth, he keeps plunging into him again and again, as if to spark a fire within the body that resents him wholly.
Blade’s groan is guttural. “Burns…”
“Good,” Dan Heng’s praise is strained when he feels Blade tightly clench around him. Blade is taking from him, he reasons. “I… I think that’s good.”
He grasps Blade’s waist and bends down to graze his tongue along that heaving chest, wet trails serving as potential homes for flocks of cold.
When Blade chases, Dan Heng flees. When Dan Heng turns around and meets the chase with open arms, Blade falters. Today, Dan Heng chases, and Blade pushes his body further into Dan Heng for his consumption. It’s an instinctive jerk of his torso, a primal arch of his back, like his every nerve carries the memory of conceding to Yinyue-jun’s behest. Dan Heng reels in the salty taste until he snaps out of his delirium, the crash of duty pressing against his skull as a hasty reminder.
“Right, I… wanted to try this,” Dan Heng, once more, presses two fingers to Blade’s stomach. “If I could regulate your body temperature with Cloudhymn.”
Visibly, it takes Blade some seconds to catch up to reality, caught between layers of intensity within his dazed state. “What, are you unsure of yourself? If my blood vessels explode from your carelessness, you will be the only one with any worry or regret.”
Dan Heng doesn’t quite like the image being planted in his head, much less while he’s burrowed inside of Blade, but he continues.
Running smooth lines up and down Blade’s torso, he conjures a warm stream through his fingertips, into the very veins that freeze Blade to his depths. Blade’s muscles loosen as the magic wafts through his body in gentle ripples. It takes Dan Heng so much control that exhaustion pounces on him.
He lets the current wade through Blade’s form and, despite the rapid daze chasing him, begins thrusting into Blade again. He probably looks ridiculous, with his fingers sliding out of focus and moving to hold down Blade’s stomach, tempo quickening while he loses himself in heat and fervour.
“Sorry. I’m not as adept at this as I thought,” Dan Heng stammers out. “Do you feel better?”
Blade only lets out a small grumble in response, eyelids fluttering shut. The red flush sprawled across his face and skin is born of a hot scorch ripping through his insides, rather than the frigid air. Dan Heng can feel it from the sweat sliding beneath his fingers, a sign that he’s doing things right. Blade’s damp body is in a constant rhythm with Dan Heng’s eager thrusts, given no room to rest and develop another shiver.
“Stupid boy,” Blade chides. He clenches his teeth like he’s in pain, but Dan Heng intimately recognizes mockery. “Impaling me as if it’s your first time... Don’t you remember a thing or two about how to pleasure someone?”
The heat of embarrassment prickles at Dan Heng’s scales. “I… Well… This isn’t for pleasure.”
“Don’t delude yourself.”
In a fit of guilt, Dan Heng sticks his slender fingers into Blade’s mouth, giving him something to tear his frustrations into. The pierce of angered teeth makes him hitch his hips deeper into the throes of gratification, unable to resist depravity’s call. His claws, by accident, rub against the roof of Blade’s mouth, drawing blood into that strangulated throat. Maybe it is impossible to help Blade without hurting him first. He wonders if Blade’s companions have come to the same broken conclusion.
A tongue slithers across his fingers, sucking them deeper into the abyss of hatred that is Blade’s mouth, every word of his cutting like swords and spears and all else they’ve bonded over. Dan Heng becomes clumsy, distracted in his thrusting. He slips his fingers out abruptly, scraping his skin on teeth and enticing a wheezing cough out of Blade.
“Dan Feng—” is the first thing Blade sputters out, a faint string of spit and blood leaving his mouth. “Dan Feng, do it again…”
In an immediate daze, Dan Heng crashes his lips against Blade’s, pushing that name back into his sullied mouth.
With a rough twitch of his hips, he engulfs himself into Blade’s depths, reaching as far as he can, desperate to make Blade know nothing but him. It’s selfish. To think he can take Yingxing’s hand and tug him forward, but leave Dan Feng behind.
“Don’t,” Dan Heng’s brisk request comes out as a gasp as he pulls apart. “Please, just look ahead, Blade.”
But it’s him who echoes Dan Feng, whether he likes it or not, whether he acts that way on purpose or not, whether he wants to remind Blade or not. A faint shrivel of insecurity crawls into his heart that is too warm to be a dragon’s. Natural consequences, an eye for an eye.
Blade sheens and glistens with the salt of Dan Heng’s doing, a heated vessel to nestle inside of. Veering closer to release, Dan Heng debates decorating his flesh with sordid strings of white, planting seeds where barren soil once begged for his hands.
Blade is always aimlessly wandering along the fringes of two existences. Life and death. Burn and freeze. His body must be swerving in discomforting crashes, between feelings neither of them can name, the way he begins to rake at the skin around his chest. They’re slow, long, deep scratches. Almost calm.
Dan Heng slips out of him. His hand wanders to one of the reddened marks Blade has left on himself, gently stroking it with a claw.
“Are you okay?” Dan Heng asks.
Blade succeeds in filling the space beneath his nails with his own skin and blood. He stares at the scarlet around his own fingers.
He stares, until every feature of his tightens with a slow, cold anger.
“You did not ask me anything of the sort, until now,” Blade’s voice dips into a low drawl. “I don’t care for the answer. Neither should you.”
There’s a long, dreadful silence, and it’s filled with nothing but the beating of Dan Heng’s heart, a sign of the care that does exist against both of their wills.
Blade keeps taking deep breaths to calm himself, but is soon overtaken by a maddened, “How dare you ask me that?”
Dan Heng’s reflexes react before his mind does, and even then, they are outswarmed by Blade’s body abruptly lunging itself up, a living sword aiming to skewer and slice the way he does to himself. His wrists are grasped by hands far larger than his own, and he’s wrestled; not out of a desire for dominance, but out of distress. Blade’s distress has always been palpable.
Surpassing in height and muscle, Blade easily wrangles Dan Heng onto the ground, a space now warmed by Blade previously occupying it.
Blade straddles Dan Heng, but doesn’t pin him down. Rather, he retracts his hands, pulling his arms into himself like to shield the atrocity that is his existence. A beast cornering itself atop its prey. He takes haggard breaths until Dan Heng feels him cease to shake and shudder.
He lifts slowly, balancing himself by placing two hands on Dan Heng’s torso, and his weight pushes down against the tip of Dan Heng’s shaft still standing erect. Dan Heng’s lungs are snuffed out of their air.
“Can I…?” Blade’s words spill out, almost softly.
Dan Heng, in near instinct, places a hand to either side of Blade’s waist and struggles out, “You can.”
Blade splits himself on Dan Heng, almost in chagrin, his figure arching elegantly despite the rough manner he plunges below, maybe the remnants of someone grand and poised and worthy of standing by Yinyue-jun’s side. Dan Heng’s claws dig harder into already-scarred skin, aching beneath the weight of his biggest mistake.
Blade is always frustrated. With himself, with the way his own desperation is leading the act. Dan Heng readily feels his rage with every vicious scrape of stone against his back.
“Yinyue… cold,” Blade gasps out. “Why are you still so cold?”
Dan Heng wants to press every answer into his lips, but their answers had died with the people they used to be.
“You still look to me to keep you warm, then,” Dan Heng’s muddled brain comes to this dangerous conclusion. “You spend your life hunting me down for a reason.”
He spills into Blade, met with just a tiny noise nearly akin to a whimper, unbecoming of a predator who has trapped his lifelong prey beneath him. They are both at each other’s mercy; have always been, and will continue to be for a long time.
Blade spends the moments afterwards trying to finish himself off as well, but it doesn’t seem to lead to any ending. He makes pitiful attempts to splinter himself while Dan Heng softens in the aftermath of his selfish release. Eventually, the anger plaguing him reaches a grating plateau, and he swiftly tears himself away from Dan Heng’s form to stand up, stumbling backwards and clutching at his arms. Not from the cold, but from shame.
Dizziness creeping up on him, Dan Heng feels his filter and tact slipping out at the same time. Panting on the ground, he lifts a hand and beckons Blade forth.
“Come. You need me to help you, don’t you?”
“I don’t!” Blade hisses. He lifts his discarded clothes off the ground and spends a long while staring at them. Dan Heng wonders why, until he sees white drip down Blade’s thighs, a harsh reminder of the way he blanked out in depravity moments before.
Dan Heng, with shaky legs, stands up as well. His clothes at least offer the illusion of being reasonably modest, while Blade has no such luxury.
“Look, I…” Dan Heng doesn’t wait for any argument or agreement, and instead treads towards Blade to offer another round of Cloudhymn, this time to cleanse the obvious mistake he’s made.
Blade allows this final help with a sort of blank calmness that Dan Heng cannot grasp how he is capable of mustering at all, before he shoves Dan Heng away.
“Are you satisfied?” Blade says, in a way so neutral that Dan Heng could almost confuse it for genuine curiosity.
He says nothing, instead opting to watch Blade dress himself. It’s hardly possible that his clothes would have dried off by now, but Dan Heng makes no effort to change his stubborn mind. Blade will never stop causing his own pain.
It reminds Dan Heng that he, too, should return to the comfort of being human and decent. In a blink, his ears and hair shrink and any traces of his draconic bloodline are given up to a lost young man with nothing to guide him but Akivili’s ticket. He picks up his coat that has said ticket printed to its end.
Blade stands close to the cove’s stone wall, his sword nestled in his crossed arms, head turned away. He seems cold, but capable.
“Sorry, I—“ Dan Heng fiddles with the fabric of his coat, before throwing it on. It smells like spider lilies. “My companions must be worried about me. I should go.”
Blade huffs, half a laugh and half a response for the sake of a response.
“Yours, too,” Dan Heng adds.
When Dan Heng steps out and feels snow crunch beneath his shoe— because he is the first one to flee, of course he is— the sudden adrenaline of escape washes over him heavier than Scalegorge’s sinful oceans. His stomach twists in revulsion. He indulges the feeling the way someone might pick at a scab. In awkward lifts of his legs, he hastily trudges through the snow into no particular direction, and he knows he is making Pom-Pom angrier by the minute.
A stagnant landscape with no sight and no end. It hangs over their heads and binds them together even when Dan Heng claws his way to the opposite end of the planet. He might as well have left Blade to die once more, and it would have made no difference.
This planet has no moon, and Dan Heng wonders if it’s a sign that they will never find a new one together.