[ i just think the funniest possible option is for this to happen at the worst possible time. so it's happening like this - it's when lu bixing is coming to greet lin jingheng this fine morning, that he leans over and pecks him on the mouth as a kiss good afternoon that the hole for memory share opens up right underneath them.
lu bixing hits the ground, surprised, still holding onto lin's arm. he barely has enough time to process what's happening when he realizes the screen has once again dropped. there's a small, sharp gasp, and he hopes, against all hopes, this is going to be something normal -
but of course, it's not. ]
Edited 2023-02-28 20:25 (UTC)
cws for suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, self harm, self experimentation, drug use
[ after lin jingheng and monoeye hawk die, you spend one hundred days locked in your house.
you're working. the eighth is a mess in an aftermath of the battle with the seventh galaxy, and zhanlu has been destroyed. you have to fix him. you spend one hundred days in your house, alone, sending out missives. speaking to prime minister edward, too sickly to do much, taking over his duties where you can. you try and fix zhanlu.
five hundred days into your restart of life, prime minister edward passes away, of sickness, of old age, and you officially take his spot. you, as the new prime minister, host the state affair of his funeral. there was a eulogy. you think you remember people looking at you. staring. watching. you remember the caskets of nothing and the tombstones and now... you're home.
home. for five hundred days, this is where you've spent all your time. five hundred days ago, monoeye hawk and lin jingheng perished, in the battle for the seventh galaxy. five hundred days ago, your entire world ended.
there were no funerals, then.
when you first arrive at the home of engineer 001 and commander lin, as the sign cheerfully reminds you, hanging over the door, you make it all the way inside. you go to the kitchen. the ai of zhanlu, in butler mode, greets you, you think, but it sounds like it comes from underwater. you go to the refrigerator. you think - a drink. i need a drink. and you open the fridge. there's hardly anything in it - supplies in the eighth galaxy are heavily rationed, right now, and alcohol is no exception - but at the back, an unopened bottle of beer, and as your hand curls around the neck, you remember -
you see the mental image, of lin jingheng in his pajamas, bedhead, staring at the beer bottle like it personally wounded him for being so disgusting, and putting it back, and sulking to the kitchen table to a cup of cold tea, instead, and for some reason, the grief and the memory snaps the last remaining piece of your stability in two.
you scream. you just scream, at the top of your lungs, as the image vanishes, the bellow of a miserable animal, and the whole world goes dark as you stagger to the area of the house where the medical capsule is, you bang your fist on the edge of it in your frustration and start asking it, i need a hallucinogen, i need an opiate, i need drugs, give them to me, i need it, i don't want to be awake, i need it, i need it - and the capsule doesn't respond. you're shaking too hard to do anything or type anything and your fingers claw in desperation at the metal. you scream, again, despairing, drowning, miserable, slam your fist against the capsule again.
zhanlu's voice comes over your head. soft, quiet, concerned - you scream at him, too, the AI unable to do anything but warn you. "Headmaster Lu, I can't accept those requests right now, you're too unstable. Headmaster Lu, this is your first warning."
he's an AI. he has to listen to you. you ignore him, shaking, almost hyperventilating, and after the second warning, you snarl - ] Zhanlu, give me a gun.
[ because you've lost everything. in one fell swoop, in one moment, you've lost everything and you can only run from it for so long. you've worked so hard. you've done so much, to not look it in the eye, but the grief is a monster that lives under your bed and in your brain and today it rips you in two. it's all-consuming, like it was when you were a child, and zhanlu can't ignore you, and as the gun is placed into your hands, you start to bring it up, to your head, start to --
then
zhanlu projects footage on the wall in front of your head.
A 14-year-old Lin Jingheng was attending the opening ceremony of the Black Orchid Academy. The ceremonial hall was decorated with heroic histories of the Union since its founding, motivational and inspiring. The young boy sat in the corner with his attention being pulled away occasionally. But even then, he still wanted to act cool, and pretended to look around in boredom whenever he remembered he was still in the middle of a ceremony. He then accidentally noticed the small camera beside him that was recording his every move; his face reddened in embarrassment and anger as he slapped his hand down and turned off the recording.
you forget everything.
you sink down to the floor, and you watch the clip again. you watch it again. you watch it again. you watch that clip hundreds of times and you don't sleep, and the next morning, you drag yourself to your desk, grab a pocket knife, and carve a single hatch mark on your desk. you push yourself to standing. you turn off zhanlu's automation function, so he can make conscious decisions, because you - you can't be trusted with yourself, all the time. you know that, now you've fallen and burnt to ashes, and now you have to rebuild yourself. one scratch mark says i fell, and i nearly quit, but i dragged myself to standing.
--
three years pass in the new independent era in the eighth galaxy. you are their leader, the face of their revolution and their prime minister, and no one outside of your home knows the turmoil that you go through. they can't see you that way. in those three years, a group of pirates and black market illegal merchants reemerged, emboldened by the chance to disrupt the economy you've worked so hard to build. it launches the galaxy into a war that lasts three long years, and you command your military forces and your political forces like an expert. you are an expert, you're the prime minister lu bixing. you can do anything.
five more scratch marks are carved into your desk.
you promised prime minister edward before he died this - if you fell seven times, you'd get up eight. these are your falls. these are your dips into despair that are so deep that you want to die. you want to die. locked into the misery of your ruthless job, alone, you want to die. you want to die, you want to die, you want to die.
you can't die. the eighth needs you.
after the first one hundred days on your own, your house is invaded by other engineers who come to help you work on zhanlu so he's no longer just in emergency mode. it takes you all a total of four hundred days to get him online, but the other engineers are so crowded and messy that you force them out, and you need to move things to the attic. the attic is untouched and filled with lin jingheng's things. you could almost see him next to you. you could almost have him there.
you light up a cigarette. you inhale, just for the sake of the familiarity. to feel like he's there, that you could see him, that he's not gone and you were just delusional the whole time, stupid -
- the smoke burns your lungs, and you start to cough, violently, violently, and you take the cigarette and you smash the burning end into your arm until the pain is so bright and smart that it forces you to come back to your senses. he's dead. lin jingheng is dead. nothing will bring him back and he is dead.
two hatch marks.
another day, you find yourself trembling as you inject a biochip in your arm. it's an opium biochip - the kind being used to create 'perfect humans', though the data is incomplete. it won't be, for you. it becomes your pet project. you work. you experiment on yourself. you inject yourself, over and over again. you work. you work. you don't sleep. you rule the eighth galaxy, you unite its forces through carrot and through stick, monitoring public executions and supply rations and economic growth and population happiness all at once, and you pull an entire galaxy to its feet while you tremble on your knees in the dark.
three hatch marks. four. five.
(you download all of the video data of lin jingheng in zhanlu's system. you watch every single part of it. you work. you work, you work, you work, you throw yourself into your duties and at night you take drugs and force yourself to sleep only when you need to, or when zhanlu forces you to, like a tiny hand tugging at your pinky finger when you're about to let loose on the world.)
--
in the seventh year of the new era, one of your students, brilliant, brilliant mint, pilots the first program to travel through the heart of the rose, the wormhole at the edge of your galaxy, your natural barrier. you are told not to go, but you go, anyway. what's the worst that could happen? you'll die? you don't care. you go on your own.
the people in the eighth praise your courage when you return with fresh research for mint's project. you didn't die. instead, you gathered data, and from the inside of the wormhole, the data gathered gets you the visuals on what happened when the seventh and the eighth galaxy fleets, respectively, were destroyed. your father's ship. lin's. gone. destroyed, in the blink of an eye.
you come home from your trip. you order captain turan to station patrols around the wormhole, now that it's active. you lock yourself in your lab. you take a strand of lin's hair you extracted from the couch and you open a breeding tank in a fit of madness nad you think, i could just reconstruct him, because you could, you're a genius, it would be easy, it would be so easy, and zhanlu blows up the breeding tank.
you stay in the dark lab for three days afterwards, but when you emerge, the knife comes out, and you scratch the sixth mark into the wood of your desk.
--
the final hatch mark is the product of your research, nine years into the new era of the Eighth Galaxy.
you stand there on the precipice. you stand there, with your completed opiate biochip research. with this completed project, with all the tests you ran on yourself, you've given yourself those abilities. you are fast. you are strong, you are, in essence, the perfect human, and you've found a way you could transplant it into anyone. tested on mice, tested on yourself. you have learned that the rainbow virus can be used to break humanity down to ashes, and rebuild them as something greater. you know, now, why you lived through that first outbreak.
you could have an army of superhumans, you could take over the IUS. you could take over the entire universe. it has taken you nine years to prove this scientific theory, and you found out that it's true.
(you could wreak destruction, on the people who took your father and lin jingheng from you.)
you stare at the papers in your hands. they tremble.
this time, you don't call captain turan. this time, you don't call the engineering department. this time you don't deliver the research. you go to your office. you work, all day long. you come home, and you stare at the papers.
you walk to your lab, where you've secretly kept those strains of the rainbow virus, papers in hand.
and you set the sample and every single paper ablaze, and destroy it for good.
when you return to your desk, you mark the final hatch mark.
if you fall seven times, you have to rise eight.
with a storm in your heart, you turn away from destruction.
with a storm in your heart, you rise. ]
gives this a tag to fuckin live in the moment jfc claps
[ lin jingheng watches this memory play out like a film at the cinema. were the subject not so dour and literally close to home, this might even constitute a date. instead, his ass hurts and his breath is slowly catching in his lungs as he watches the days and weeks go by, sees the hair curl around lu bixing's ears, watching him tear himself limb from limb.
his fingers curl around the arms of the chair, his eyes wide. there isn't a word for it, because it's both horror and tragedy, it's a man stewing in his grief. he watches him salvage zhanlu, watches him numb himself up to the point of where he has to bite down on his tongue so he doesn't say a word.
until finally the lights slowly rise. he can hear something in the background shifting, starting to switch film, but there's a short amount of time in between.
a cold sweet starts to form along his spine. and as he turns to look at lu bixing, his brows are knit and his breath won't go anywhere, a solid brick in his lungs. he fumbles in what remains of the dark to grab lu bixing's hand before he can even think about trying to escape this place without him.
uttered softly, round like it's on the verge of sadness that doesn't know how to grieve anymore. ]
Bixing.
[ he clutches his fingers, holds fast to his knuckles desperately.
the theory of magnetism that surrounds lu bixing is dangerous, like wildfire, and lin jingheng has witnessed its pull time and time again. lu bixing could see failure and forge himself anew, and finally, lin jingheng whispers: ]
I came as fast as I could.
[ this is not an excuse, he begs no forgiveness. it's the beginning of a story, and he can't tell it alone. but as he waits, he gives lu bixing the floor to speak. ]
I have the time. The means. I can tell you now... [ it makes him sick. ]
he's trying not to have a panic attack. let's put that in perspective.
lu bixing's done a really good job trying to put himself back together, here. with the help of lin and the chance to rebuild, he's been, brick by brick, able to claw himself back together. the facade he's so carefully trained and focused on building over the past seventeen years is almost, almost flawless, and the places where he's stumbled, he's had lin there to see. he's never seen the worst of it. just the cracked and broken pieces that remain.
... but this. this is everything, laid out raw.
this is every horrible part of lu bixing over the past seventeen years. this is the public executions and the experimentation, this is the track marks on his arms, the crushing, miserable grief. he sucks in a breath that feels like it's too big for his lungs and jerks backwards, and he'd almost laugh, that lin knows him so well that he grabs his hand.
for him, this is like torture.
he shuts his eyes when he hears his knife scrape through his desk the final time. he's trembling, shaking like a leaf, and the first thing out of his mouth is a choked off - ]
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
[ isn't it a time to beg forgiveness?
he barely hears what lin jingheng says over the sound of his blood rushing in his ears. over the shame that rips through his system like a wildfire. over anxious, miserable fear. lin knows, now. he knows every part. it doesn't matter that he rebuilt himself, because the ashes are still there. he wants out of this hole. he wants - he wants - ]
[ he can tell that his words are wasted, and he instead shifts some more, moves so that he can reach over and press his palms against lu bixing's ears. there's no uncertainty to it, just an instinctive moment to grab his head and turn him to look him in the eye. don't look away, don't act like you've done shameful things.
he won't scold him about weakness, won't linger over the days spent pouring over his hair... he won't... he doesn't... instead, he pushes a thumb over his lips that are babbling about being sorry. ]
Shh.
[ i don't want them, there's nothing to apologize for. but he doesn't say it, just makes sure that they've been brought to the same page of half of the story. ]
I'm here. [ the lights dim. we're in hell. ] I'm... here.
[ this has the desired effect, because it shuts lu bixing the fuck up. he lets out a hiccup of a noise that might be a sob, a lump in his throat so thick he's not sure he can talk around it, grabbing lin's wrist and holding on for dear life. the i'm here is like a drill, burrowing into his subconsciousness, and he clings on, holding tight.
- and of course, that's when the screen starts.
that's - lin jingshu, and doctor hardin, and. lin, that's lin, looking thinner than he did when he came back from fighting ares von. lu bixing is too smart not to put together the pieces, that this is one of the only pieces of lin jingheng's life that he doesn't know, now. it's the seventeen years they were apart. and lin is -
when jingshu almost injects him, he stops breathing.
and then his lin, his beautiful, his brilliant lin, finds that strand of consciousness and he lies, he lies to his sister, he manages to survive another day so effectively and so brilliantly that lu bixing's knees give out in sheer relief. he's clinging to him before he even realizes it, before the film totally stops, grabbing onto his shirt and his wrist for dear fucking life and taking in a huge, shaky gulp of air as he just forgets entirely about his own shame and fear.
it's like the first week all over again, as he grabs onto lin jingheng and pulls him into himself and holds onto him like he can remind himself he's real. he's crying before he even realizes it, thick, fat tears dripping down his cheeks as he turns his head and shoves it into lin jingheng's shoulder and just tries to force himself to calm down. he's alive. he's alive. he's alive, and he's safe, and he was a prisoner, for seventeen years and he had no idea and lu bixing was so busy fucking wallowing he never found him.
he buries his face in his shoulder and just. clings. that's all he can do, just clings, and reminds himself that lin jingheng is alive. ]
Lin. [ he says, finally, quietly, almost desperately. it's the only syllable his mouth can say. ]
[ she'd made it impossible, and for all of lu bixing's intelligence, he knew he would need to pull himself out of the proverbial cement shoes himself. lin jingheng has never learned how to save himself for someone else, but he manages it, he claws at his consciousness until his fingers bleed, until the thread dyes read and blossoms past the drugs.
he stops dissociating. maybe. a little bit. turning to lu bixing slightly in how they're so aggressively cocooned against one another. lin falls forward when he's grabbed, legs falling over the arm of the theatre seat. still, even as he's grabbed, feels the heat of lu bixing's tears falling onto his shoulder—he allows it, leans into it, and digs fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck, scratching slowly. he's here, he's here.
lin jingheng leans into him fully, careful of his bad shoulder, clutching him close as zhanlu suddenly whispers a soft lullaby between the both of them, small and lilting like a finger under the chin. he holds onto him tighter. muffled, again, with feeling this time: ]
I'm sorry.
[ guilt floods him, for not explaining sooner, but how do you even explain to begin with? what do you even fucking say? it's so overwhelming he's been circling the drain between that and the moment on the ship where he'd been shot—
not him, but him. it shakes the pieces of his soul again, fragments. ]
[ alive. he's alive. he's alive. lu bixing has been repeating this mantra to himself every single day since he's gotten here, and he's doing it right now, too. he's solid. he's real. he's right here, under lu bixing's nose, in his fingers, under his body. he's grounding himself to it with every technique that his brilliant brain can manage, before he disassociates off of this plane of existence. he lets the nails at the back of his neck, the sound of zhanlu singing.
he hiccups, again, and shakes his head, burying his face in his shoulder even harder. he's soaking lin's shoulder now, his own shoulders trembling, as he breathes in. cigarette smoke and aftershave. whiskey and lin jingheng. breathe in, breathe out. breathe in, breathe out. (he almost lost him again, he'd been alive and he was miserable and trapped and he almost died and lin jingshu tried to keep him like a flower in a glass dome and lu bixing feels this irrationally angry twist of hatred that's so unlike him that it knocks him almost breathless again and he shivers, forces it back) ]
It's -
[ soft. it's not fine. it's not at all. he can't say that. ]
Two... two thousand times, you said. [ is what lu bixing manages, shakily, curling his fingers white knuckled into the fabric of lin's coat. ] I should have - We could have found you.
[ he slides fingers over the white knuckled grip lu bixing has his coat in, strokes down the trembling tendons and closes his eyes. he cocoons them in, and the theatre remains fairly dark and still just for the two of them. ]
She made sure we'd never be found...
[ "i didn't expect you to find us. i don't hold that against you." he clutches back against lu bixing, meets his eyes, his trembling voice. he presses against his chest, steadies him with the pressure of their hearts thudding rapidly against one another. nightmare after nightmare, his head is swimming. ]
he takes a slow, steadying breath and lets lin's fingers ground him. it feels like a dam has broken - he's done decently at keeping himself from crying except their very first day, but the tears are starting now and won't stop, and he just lets them fall.
seeing lin nearly die again on the screen, and knowing what happened in that seventeen year block is both horrifying and comforting in a twisted way (knowing he wasn't living some other life but hell, instead). it's also distracting from the horror of his own guilt and shame of the seventeen years he lived without him, too, and he just sinks into lin jingheng and shakes his head against his jacket. ]
I'm so sorry. [ he says, instead, quietly. muffled. miserably. sorry more that he had to go through it than anything - that he was alone. ]
[ slowly he strokes his hair, lets his fingers taper down to his neck and squeezes gently. for a while, he stays like this, frozen save for the mechanical motions to soothe bixing, who is crying into his shoulder, wetting his shirt and making him wish he could find the strength in him to pull him back and wipe them away. but he can't because he's so tired. between the both of them, there are years of aches and pains they've had to grow up without one another to help soothe.
wind-battered and sea-struck ships in a vast sea of the unknown. ]
I found you... [ soft, clutching him harder. ] I found you, it doesn't matter anymore.
[ me just like im in a mood let me do my gay little lulins
just feeling that lin jingheng is there is enough. knowing that he's a solid, real presence in lu bixing's arms helps him with the worst of his nightmares. helps him when he wakes up terrified on friday mornings, always gasping for air and clutching at the space beside him. it helps him when he's scared and insecure, when he thinks about the hateful person he's turned into, helps him when he wonders when lin jingheng is going to wise up and leave him again. but he doesn't. he's right here.
he hiccups. the noise is soft, muffled, and he buries his face in his shoulder further, nuzzling, soaking his jacket and probably getting a little snot on it as he takes a couple of deep, shaky breaths and holds onto him like an anchor.
it doesn't matter anymore. that's all he can really do for the moment, just stay there, burrowed against lin jingheng and taking deep breaths to try and keep from having a panic attack. it's fine. he's fine. everything's fine. ]
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
w3, monday | 1/2
lu bixing hits the ground, surprised, still holding onto lin's arm. he barely has enough time to process what's happening when he realizes the screen has once again dropped. there's a small, sharp gasp, and he hopes, against all hopes, this is going to be something normal -
but of course, it's not. ]
cws for suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, self harm, self experimentation, drug use
you're working. the eighth is a mess in an aftermath of the battle with the seventh galaxy, and zhanlu has been destroyed. you have to fix him. you spend one hundred days in your house, alone, sending out missives. speaking to prime minister edward, too sickly to do much, taking over his duties where you can. you try and fix zhanlu.
five hundred days into your restart of life, prime minister edward passes away, of sickness, of old age, and you officially take his spot. you, as the new prime minister, host the state affair of his funeral. there was a eulogy. you think you remember people looking at you. staring. watching. you remember the caskets of nothing and the tombstones and now... you're home.
home. for five hundred days, this is where you've spent all your time. five hundred days ago, monoeye hawk and lin jingheng perished, in the battle for the seventh galaxy. five hundred days ago, your entire world ended.
there were no funerals, then.
when you first arrive at the home of engineer 001 and commander lin, as the sign cheerfully reminds you, hanging over the door, you make it all the way inside. you go to the kitchen. the ai of zhanlu, in butler mode, greets you, you think, but it sounds like it comes from underwater. you go to the refrigerator. you think - a drink. i need a drink. and you open the fridge. there's hardly anything in it - supplies in the eighth galaxy are heavily rationed, right now, and alcohol is no exception - but at the back, an unopened bottle of beer, and as your hand curls around the neck, you remember -
you see the mental image, of lin jingheng in his pajamas, bedhead, staring at the beer bottle like it personally wounded him for being so disgusting, and putting it back, and sulking to the kitchen table to a cup of cold tea, instead, and for some reason, the grief and the memory snaps the last remaining piece of your stability in two.
you scream. you just scream, at the top of your lungs, as the image vanishes, the bellow of a miserable animal, and the whole world goes dark as you stagger to the area of the house where the medical capsule is, you bang your fist on the edge of it in your frustration and start asking it, i need a hallucinogen, i need an opiate, i need drugs, give them to me, i need it, i don't want to be awake, i need it, i need it - and the capsule doesn't respond. you're shaking too hard to do anything or type anything and your fingers claw in desperation at the metal. you scream, again, despairing, drowning, miserable, slam your fist against the capsule again.
zhanlu's voice comes over your head. soft, quiet, concerned - you scream at him, too, the AI unable to do anything but warn you. "Headmaster Lu, I can't accept those requests right now, you're too unstable. Headmaster Lu, this is your first warning."
he's an AI. he has to listen to you. you ignore him, shaking, almost hyperventilating, and after the second warning, you snarl - ] Zhanlu, give me a gun.
[ because you've lost everything. in one fell swoop, in one moment, you've lost everything and you can only run from it for so long. you've worked so hard. you've done so much, to not look it in the eye, but the grief is a monster that lives under your bed and in your brain and today it rips you in two. it's all-consuming, like it was when you were a child, and zhanlu can't ignore you, and as the gun is placed into your hands, you start to bring it up, to your head, start to --
then
zhanlu projects footage on the wall in front of your head.
you forget everything.
you sink down to the floor, and you watch the clip again. you watch it again. you watch it again. you watch that clip hundreds of times and you don't sleep, and the next morning, you drag yourself to your desk, grab a pocket knife, and carve a single hatch mark on your desk. you push yourself to standing. you turn off zhanlu's automation function, so he can make conscious decisions, because you - you can't be trusted with yourself, all the time. you know that, now you've fallen and burnt to ashes, and now you have to rebuild yourself. one scratch mark says i fell, and i nearly quit, but i dragged myself to standing.
--
three years pass in the new independent era in the eighth galaxy. you are their leader, the face of their revolution and their prime minister, and no one outside of your home knows the turmoil that you go through. they can't see you that way. in those three years, a group of pirates and black market illegal merchants reemerged, emboldened by the chance to disrupt the economy you've worked so hard to build. it launches the galaxy into a war that lasts three long years, and you command your military forces and your political forces like an expert. you are an expert, you're the prime minister lu bixing. you can do anything.
five more scratch marks are carved into your desk.
you promised prime minister edward before he died this - if you fell seven times, you'd get up eight. these are your falls. these are your dips into despair that are so deep that you want to die. you want to die. locked into the misery of your ruthless job, alone, you want to die. you want to die, you want to die, you want to die.
you can't die. the eighth needs you.
after the first one hundred days on your own, your house is invaded by other engineers who come to help you work on zhanlu so he's no longer just in emergency mode. it takes you all a total of four hundred days to get him online, but the other engineers are so crowded and messy that you force them out, and you need to move things to the attic. the attic is untouched and filled with lin jingheng's things. you could almost see him next to you. you could almost have him there.
you light up a cigarette. you inhale, just for the sake of the familiarity. to feel like he's there, that you could see him, that he's not gone and you were just delusional the whole time, stupid -
- the smoke burns your lungs, and you start to cough, violently, violently, and you take the cigarette and you smash the burning end into your arm until the pain is so bright and smart that it forces you to come back to your senses. he's dead. lin jingheng is dead. nothing will bring him back and he is dead.
two hatch marks.
another day, you find yourself trembling as you inject a biochip in your arm. it's an opium biochip - the kind being used to create 'perfect humans', though the data is incomplete. it won't be, for you. it becomes your pet project. you work. you experiment on yourself. you inject yourself, over and over again. you work. you work. you don't sleep. you rule the eighth galaxy, you unite its forces through carrot and through stick, monitoring public executions and supply rations and economic growth and population happiness all at once, and you pull an entire galaxy to its feet while you tremble on your knees in the dark.
three hatch marks. four. five.
(you download all of the video data of lin jingheng in zhanlu's system. you watch every single part of it. you work. you work, you work, you work, you throw yourself into your duties and at night you take drugs and force yourself to sleep only when you need to, or when zhanlu forces you to, like a tiny hand tugging at your pinky finger when you're about to let loose on the world.)
--
in the seventh year of the new era, one of your students, brilliant, brilliant mint, pilots the first program to travel through the heart of the rose, the wormhole at the edge of your galaxy, your natural barrier. you are told not to go, but you go, anyway. what's the worst that could happen? you'll die? you don't care. you go on your own.
the people in the eighth praise your courage when you return with fresh research for mint's project. you didn't die. instead, you gathered data, and from the inside of the wormhole, the data gathered gets you the visuals on what happened when the seventh and the eighth galaxy fleets, respectively, were destroyed. your father's ship. lin's. gone. destroyed, in the blink of an eye.
you come home from your trip. you order captain turan to station patrols around the wormhole, now that it's active. you lock yourself in your lab. you take a strand of lin's hair you extracted from the couch and you open a breeding tank in a fit of madness nad you think, i could just reconstruct him, because you could, you're a genius, it would be easy, it would be so easy, and zhanlu blows up the breeding tank.
you stay in the dark lab for three days afterwards, but when you emerge, the knife comes out, and you scratch the sixth mark into the wood of your desk.
--
the final hatch mark is the product of your research, nine years into the new era of the Eighth Galaxy.
you stand there on the precipice. you stand there, with your completed opiate biochip research. with this completed project, with all the tests you ran on yourself, you've given yourself those abilities. you are fast. you are strong, you are, in essence, the perfect human, and you've found a way you could transplant it into anyone. tested on mice, tested on yourself. you have learned that the rainbow virus can be used to break humanity down to ashes, and rebuild them as something greater. you know, now, why you lived through that first outbreak.
you could have an army of superhumans, you could take over the IUS. you could take over the entire universe. it has taken you nine years to prove this scientific theory, and you found out that it's true.
(you could wreak destruction, on the people who took your father and lin jingheng from you.)
you stare at the papers in your hands. they tremble.
this time, you don't call captain turan. this time, you don't call the engineering department. this time you don't deliver the research. you go to your office. you work, all day long. you come home, and you stare at the papers.
you walk to your lab, where you've secretly kept those strains of the rainbow virus, papers in hand.
and you set the sample and every single paper ablaze, and destroy it for good.
when you return to your desk, you mark the final hatch mark.
if you fall seven times, you have to rise eight.
with a storm in your heart, you turn away from destruction.
with a storm in your heart, you rise. ]
gives this a tag to fuckin live in the moment jfc claps
his fingers curl around the arms of the chair, his eyes wide. there isn't a word for it, because it's both horror and tragedy, it's a man stewing in his grief. he watches him salvage zhanlu, watches him numb himself up to the point of where he has to bite down on his tongue so he doesn't say a word.
until finally the lights slowly rise. he can hear something in the background shifting, starting to switch film, but there's a short amount of time in between.
a cold sweet starts to form along his spine. and as he turns to look at lu bixing, his brows are knit and his breath won't go anywhere, a solid brick in his lungs. he fumbles in what remains of the dark to grab lu bixing's hand before he can even think about trying to escape this place without him.
uttered softly, round like it's on the verge of sadness that doesn't know how to grieve anymore. ]
Bixing.
[ he clutches his fingers, holds fast to his knuckles desperately.
the theory of magnetism that surrounds lu bixing is dangerous, like wildfire, and lin jingheng has witnessed its pull time and time again. lu bixing could see failure and forge himself anew, and finally, lin jingheng whispers: ]
I came as fast as I could.
[ this is not an excuse, he begs no forgiveness. it's the beginning of a story, and he can't tell it alone. but as he waits, he gives lu bixing the floor to speak. ]
I have the time. The means. I can tell you now... [ it makes him sick. ]
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well
he's trying not to have a panic attack. let's put that in perspective.
lu bixing's done a really good job trying to put himself back together, here. with the help of lin and the chance to rebuild, he's been, brick by brick, able to claw himself back together. the facade he's so carefully trained and focused on building over the past seventeen years is almost, almost flawless, and the places where he's stumbled, he's had lin there to see. he's never seen the worst of it. just the cracked and broken pieces that remain.
... but this. this is everything, laid out raw.
this is every horrible part of lu bixing over the past seventeen years. this is the public executions and the experimentation, this is the track marks on his arms, the crushing, miserable grief. he sucks in a breath that feels like it's too big for his lungs and jerks backwards, and he'd almost laugh, that lin knows him so well that he grabs his hand.
for him, this is like torture.
he shuts his eyes when he hears his knife scrape through his desk the final time. he's trembling, shaking like a leaf, and the first thing out of his mouth is a choked off - ]
I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.
[ isn't it a time to beg forgiveness?
he barely hears what lin jingheng says over the sound of his blood rushing in his ears. over the shame that rips through his system like a wildfire. over anxious, miserable fear. lin knows, now. he knows every part. it doesn't matter that he rebuilt himself, because the ashes are still there. he wants out of this hole. he wants - he wants - ]
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he won't scold him about weakness, won't linger over the days spent pouring over his hair... he won't... he doesn't... instead, he pushes a thumb over his lips that are babbling about being sorry. ]
Shh.
[ i don't want them, there's nothing to apologize for. but he doesn't say it, just makes sure that they've been brought to the same page of half of the story. ]
I'm here. [ the lights dim. we're in hell. ] I'm... here.
[ a film flickers onto the screen. lin jingheng doesn't move until lu bixing does, frozen in the face of his own anxiety. ]
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- and of course, that's when the screen starts.
that's - lin jingshu, and doctor hardin, and. lin, that's lin, looking thinner than he did when he came back from fighting ares von. lu bixing is too smart not to put together the pieces, that this is one of the only pieces of lin jingheng's life that he doesn't know, now. it's the seventeen years they were apart. and lin is -
when jingshu almost injects him, he stops breathing.
and then his lin, his beautiful, his brilliant lin, finds that strand of consciousness and he lies, he lies to his sister, he manages to survive another day so effectively and so brilliantly that lu bixing's knees give out in sheer relief. he's clinging to him before he even realizes it, before the film totally stops, grabbing onto his shirt and his wrist for dear fucking life and taking in a huge, shaky gulp of air as he just forgets entirely about his own shame and fear.
it's like the first week all over again, as he grabs onto lin jingheng and pulls him into himself and holds onto him like he can remind himself he's real. he's crying before he even realizes it, thick, fat tears dripping down his cheeks as he turns his head and shoves it into lin jingheng's shoulder and just tries to force himself to calm down. he's alive. he's alive. he's alive, and he's safe, and he was a prisoner, for seventeen years and he had no idea and lu bixing was so busy fucking wallowing he never found him.
he buries his face in his shoulder and just. clings. that's all he can do, just clings, and reminds himself that lin jingheng is alive. ]
Lin. [ he says, finally, quietly, almost desperately. it's the only syllable his mouth can say. ]
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he stops dissociating. maybe. a little bit. turning to lu bixing slightly in how they're so aggressively cocooned against one another. lin falls forward when he's grabbed, legs falling over the arm of the theatre seat. still, even as he's grabbed, feels the heat of lu bixing's tears falling onto his shoulder—he allows it, leans into it, and digs fingers into the hair at the nape of his neck, scratching slowly. he's here, he's here.
lin jingheng leans into him fully, careful of his bad shoulder, clutching him close as zhanlu suddenly whispers a soft lullaby between the both of them, small and lilting like a finger under the chin. he holds onto him tighter. muffled, again, with feeling this time: ]
I'm sorry.
[ guilt floods him, for not explaining sooner, but how do you even explain to begin with? what do you even fucking say? it's so overwhelming he's been circling the drain between that and the moment on the ship where he'd been shot—
not him, but him. it shakes the pieces of his soul again, fragments. ]
The words don't come easy.
[ he knows him. ]
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he hiccups, again, and shakes his head, burying his face in his shoulder even harder. he's soaking lin's shoulder now, his own shoulders trembling, as he breathes in. cigarette smoke and aftershave. whiskey and lin jingheng. breathe in, breathe out. breathe in, breathe out. (he almost lost him again, he'd been alive and he was miserable and trapped and he almost died and lin jingshu tried to keep him like a flower in a glass dome and lu bixing feels this irrationally angry twist of hatred that's so unlike him that it knocks him almost breathless again and he shivers, forces it back) ]
It's -
[ soft. it's not fine. it's not at all. he can't say that. ]
Two... two thousand times, you said. [ is what lu bixing manages, shakily, curling his fingers white knuckled into the fabric of lin's coat. ] I should have - We could have found you.
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[ he slides fingers over the white knuckled grip lu bixing has his coat in, strokes down the trembling tendons and closes his eyes. he cocoons them in, and the theatre remains fairly dark and still just for the two of them. ]
She made sure we'd never be found...
[ "i didn't expect you to find us. i don't hold that against you." he clutches back against lu bixing, meets his eyes, his trembling voice. he presses against his chest, steadies him with the pressure of their hearts thudding rapidly against one another. nightmare after nightmare, his head is swimming. ]
Don't.
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he takes a slow, steadying breath and lets lin's fingers ground him. it feels like a dam has broken - he's done decently at keeping himself from crying except their very first day, but the tears are starting now and won't stop, and he just lets them fall.
seeing lin nearly die again on the screen, and knowing what happened in that seventeen year block is both horrifying and comforting in a twisted way (knowing he wasn't living some other life but hell, instead). it's also distracting from the horror of his own guilt and shame of the seventeen years he lived without him, too, and he just sinks into lin jingheng and shakes his head against his jacket. ]
I'm so sorry. [ he says, instead, quietly. muffled. miserably. sorry more that he had to go through it than anything - that he was alone. ]
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wind-battered and sea-struck ships in a vast sea of the unknown. ]
I found you... [ soft, clutching him harder. ] I found you, it doesn't matter anymore.
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just feeling that lin jingheng is there is enough. knowing that he's a solid, real presence in lu bixing's arms helps him with the worst of his nightmares. helps him when he wakes up terrified on friday mornings, always gasping for air and clutching at the space beside him. it helps him when he's scared and insecure, when he thinks about the hateful person he's turned into, helps him when he wonders when lin jingheng is going to wise up and leave him again. but he doesn't. he's right here.
he hiccups. the noise is soft, muffled, and he buries his face in his shoulder further, nuzzling, soaking his jacket and probably getting a little snot on it as he takes a couple of deep, shaky breaths and holds onto him like an anchor.
it doesn't matter anymore. that's all he can really do for the moment, just stay there, burrowed against lin jingheng and taking deep breaths to try and keep from having a panic attack. it's fine. he's fine. everything's fine. ]