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The door to Zhao Yunlan’s apartment closes behind him.
The sliver of light against the floor narrows to nothing, and then disappears with the click of the latch. Shen Wei is left standing alone in the dim hallway between their front doors.
It’s bewildering, the fact that he’s still standing. That somehow, he’s still breathing, in and back out, just the same as he had been doing before.
Shen Wei can still hear the memory-echo of Zhao Yunlan’s voice, demanding, Then what do you want me to do? Should I be overwhelmed with gratitude? Get on my knees and bow to you? He can still hear that first, sharp clatter of the kitchen knife.
Shen Wei lifts one hand to his face and observes, with an almost detached curiosity, the way it won’t stop trembling.
That flash-spill of memory when Zhao Yunlan had shouted, It’s not as though you’re immortal! Why should I so casually owe you my life? A clifftop, a starlit night. The sudden cool rush of air against his cheeks when Kunlun pulled his mask away. That burst of sweetness, like nothing Shen Wei had ever tasted before.
As if Shen Wei could have forgotten that boastful, childish promise he’d made, ten thousand years ago to a general he idolized: I owe you my life, and I’ll be sure to repay that debt. The most serious thing he could think to say, to keep Kunlun’s attention. As if Shen Wei might really have died in that skirmish, had Zhao Yunlan never appeared.
Shen Wei had spent a lifetime holding onto the confusing solemnity of Kunlun’s response afterward, the weight in his voice when he said, You’ve long since repaid it. It had been slowly becoming clear to Shen Wei, from the moment he understood what that family heirloom of Li Qian’s really was, what he would eventually have the chance to do.
Shen Wei can still feel the reverberation of his own reply: This life — I’m returning it to you. The low growl of his own voice like the words were being pulled out out his chest. That shocked, confused look on Zhao Yunlan’s face. As if he thought himself still somehow undeserving, after all this time.
As if Zhao Yunlan wasn’t singular to Shen Wei in the entirety of the universe.
The growl of the building elevator down the hall, and Shen Wei has a palmful of dark energy before he can remember not to. The mechanical rattle as the elevator drops past their floor, and Shen Wei closes his hand back into an empty fist.
The memories cut through him: The slack, peaceful expression of Zhao Yunlan asleep, his body always curled toward the main room. That instinctive way he would reach for Shen Wei, patting along his shoulder for his forearm, for his wrist. Just earlier that night: sitting in companionable quiet on the couch, Zhao Yunlan’s hand tapping along the leather until it found Shen Wei’s ankle and settled there, skin against skin.
As if Zhao Yunlan had gotten used to it too, all that touching. All that comfortable, worn-easy cohabitation. Their bodies as close as their lives were tangled now.
Shen Wei will miss it all.
In the echoing hallway silence, Shen Wei listens to footsteps beyond the closed door of Zhao Yunlan’s apartment. The open and shut slam of one of Zhao Yunlan’s kitchen cabinets, the ones beside the sink where Zhao Yunlan keeps his alcohol. More footsteps, coming toward the front door.
Shen Wei doesn’t know what he’d do if Zhao Yunlan came after him. If Zhao Yunlan opened his front door into the hall and found Shen Wei still standing there. If Zhao Yunlan’s eyes flicked to Shen Wei’s trembling hands and away again, and then with some searching, serious look, Zhao Yunlan asked, Why did you do that for me, Shen Wei?
Shen Wei swallows. He wouldn’t be able to stop himself a second time.
Faced with Zhao Yunlan silhouetted in light, one hand on the doorknob and the glow of his front room spilling out from behind him, the floor of the hallway spread with light and even the toes of Shen Wei’s loafers gleaming in that brightness —
As if Shen Wei could keep from telling Zhao Yunlan everything, then.
Shen Wei fumbles the key out of his pocket into the lock of his own apartment door. The doorknob is cold in his hand, and the door swings open onto darkness.
In the silence of his apartment, Shen Wei presses the door shut, turns the lock. And then, like his body was waiting until he was alone, his legs give out. He tips into the wall, sinks down to sitting on his front mat. Closes his eyes.
Shen Wei sits there for a long while, one arm around his knees and his other hand pressed against the pendant beneath his shirt. The whole time, his body braced for the sound of Zhao Yunlan’s door opening, his footsteps crossing the hall. Waiting, again, for Kunlun to return to him.
But no sound comes from outside his door.
At last, he tips his head back against the wall and lets out a soft, streaming sigh. The sound trembles in the still air. Without taking his glasses off, Shen Wei passes a hand across his eyes. It’s the closest he’s come to crying in years.
In his darkened apartment, all of the furniture carries a strange feeling of unfamiliarity. The bulk of the armchairs and sofa, the loft of the bookcases — all of which had been here long before Shen Wei had moved in, all of them unmoved from their magazine-spread arrangement. All of it so unlike Zhao Yunlan’s apartment, with the detritus of living scattered across every surface.
Even with his eyes adjusted to the lack of light, this apartment is only a place to sleep in, a second place to work in when he needs to leave his office. Even now, the only person that has ever come over to sit on that sofa is Zhao Yunlan.
And then, Shen Wei remembers: he’d left his jacket across the hall when he’d walked out.
Shen Wei knows where it is, can picture it exactly. It’s folded over the back of Zhao Yunlan’s leather sofa, right beside Zhao Yunlan’s leather jacket. Even earlier that day, opening the door himself and walking in ahead of Shen Wei, Zhao Yunlan had still let Shen Wei take that jacket from him. Had shrugged it off and handed it over without looking, into Shen Wei’s waiting hands. As if it had become habit for him as well.
Shen Wei had gotten used to taking these kinds of liberties, because Zhao Yunlan had kept letting him, kept asking for it, even. Cooking his meals, driving his car, spending the night. All those times Shen Wei would walk into the apartment and find Zhao Yunlan sitting on the couch with headphones plugged into his laptop, the screen reader software Lin Jing had helped him install flashing across the text of case documents as he listened. All those times when Zhao Yunlan would turn toward the front door as Shen Wei walked through it, pulling his headphones off, already smiling. His hands tapping across his keyboard to pause the software and saying, Ah, Shen Wei, you’re home! Will you read to me after dinner? I like it better when you do the voices of the different suspects.
As if in actuality Shen Wei ever did anything special for the suspects’ statements, or that Shen Wei's sometimes stumbling reading was any better than the computer, when he misread an unfamiliar character and neither of them caught it for minutes. As if Shen Wei wouldn’t agree, almost always, to do it anyway.
Here, in his own space for more than a few moments for the first time in weeks, his old routines drift back up: the solitary sound of the kettle boiling for tea, the uninterrupted hours grading at his desk while the night slid by, the echoing silence when he finally went to bed without a word.
There’s a dim ache in his lower back from sitting on the floor for so long. Shen Wei makes his way slowly to standing, hand on the front doorknob. He doesn’t want to be here, anymore.
Dragon City never really sleeps, but it’s still a shock to be buffeted by it all as he walks across town — the noise, the lights. The rush of street traffic and the distant dopplering wail of sirens. Pulsing music and the sharp sound of laughter as Shen Wei passes a nightclub, doors opening and people spilling out onto the sidewalk in droves.
He’d been frightened of it all, when he first arrived in the city. This new Haixing so different than the one he’d gone to sleep in. The strange sounds, the strange clothes. The terrifying roar of the moving machines passing far too close. Shen Wei remembers dodging passerby on the crowded sidewalks day after day, aching for the familiar quiet of the mountains.
Now, all the clamor just reminds him of last week.
Shen Wei hadn’t seen much of Dragon City’s nightlife, not until he was spending his days walking through Zhao Yunlan’s life. Then suddenly, he was out three or four evenings a week, learning just where Zhao Yunlan used to be on those nights when Shen Wei didn’t hear his steps in the hall until close to midnight. Some evenings they stopped at food stalls where Zhao Yunlan would order before Shen Wei could even start reading down the menu, always enough for both of them. Other nights they crammed into neon-lit bars where Shen Wei would squint dutifully down the list of beers on tap until Zhao Yunlan said, Yeah, that one, and then beam at the bartender with a magnanimous, and a seltzer for the gentleman. And sometimes, Shen Wei would walk with Zhao Yunlan to nowhere in particular, looping around downtown or the university campus just to settle Zhao Yunlan’s after-dinner restlessness.
But always, there was the warm gasp of Zhao Yunlan’s hand just above Shen Wei’s elbow, the steady presence of him half a pace behind and walking in step. They’d gone up to the campus twice last week, Shen Wei slowing when they came to the main staircase. Each time, Zhao Yunlan had stopped easily behind him, the experience familiar enough now that the slightest shifts had become signals to them both. Each time, the little inviting tilt of Zhao Yunlan’s jaw when Shen Wei leaned over to murmur, The main campus staircase is ahead of us, going up. Two steps to the first landing, and each time, the warm squeeze of Zhao Yunlan’s hand in acknowledgement as they started upward.
Now, coming up to those same stairs, Shen Wei only makes it up a single step before he turns to take the long way around to his office.
Blanketed in the deep blue hush of near-midnight, the university campus is nearly silent. The occasional beleaguered student in the distance, leaving one of the campus libraries, hurrying down the concrete footpaths toward home. The looming grey of the university buildings with all their windows dark. The feeling of it swallows him.
The lamps make hazy yellow circles of pavement and trimmed grass that sharpen his shadow as Shen Wei passes through them. His breath fogs in the air for a long moment before dispersing.
Coming up to the biology building, the silent flash of the scanner lights as he badges in. The hallway lights snap on as Shen Wei winds his way through the maze of corridors, cold fluorescence, one after another until he stops outside his office door.
Shen Wei can’t count, anymore, the number of times he’s come up to this office after lecturing, and found Zhao Yunlan waiting, slouched against the closed door, fiddling with his phone. The quick, bright flash of his smile when he recognized Shen Wei’s footsteps.
Shen Wei presses his hand to the door and it swings open.
Shen Wei lets the door click shut behind him without turning the light on, blinks slow and deliberate until his eyes adjust to the darkness. He’s not sure, now that he’s arrived, why he’d come here. Except that there had been nowhere else he could think to go.
The two guest chairs, and the hazy shadows of the rest of his furniture. The dim shape of his work desk, with a yellow stripe of light cutting across its surface at an angle from the streetlamp outside his window. All the paperwork that he’d put off during these weeks of immersing himself in Zhao Yunlan’s life, standing in tall, tidy stacks that he hasn’t had time yet to sort through.
Shen Wei pulls in a slow breath. In the corner of his desk, half-lit, there’s a light blinking on his answering machine.
The message begins with a long stretch of silence.
There’s a feeling in the recording like the holding of breath, and Shen Wei finds his own breath shallowing, slowing to match. In, and out. In, and back out. His chest has gone tight with some sharp anticipation.
The soft fuzz of static, and more silence. Shen Wei reaches forward to skip ahead in the message, but just as his hand crosses into that yellow stripe of light, the line crackles.
“Shen Wei.”
Shen Wei’s hand darts back into shadow. It’s Zhao Yunlan’s voice.
He’s been drinking, Shen Wei guesses, a moment before Zhao Yunlan says, low and unsteady, “I probably shouldn’t be calling you like this when I’ve drunk so much.” The creak of leather, and Shen Wei can picture it: Zhao Yunlan lying on his sofa, feet up on one armrest, head against the other, their jackets folded side-by-side over the back. In the recording, Zhao Yunlan exhales, a rush of sound, and says, “Except, you didn’t answer my question. I still don't understand, Shen Wei. Why—”
Shen Wei jams his finger against the pause button of his answering machine. His heart is hammering in his chest. He should have expected this.
In the darkness of his office, the light that means there’s more of the message left to hear flashes blurry in the corner of his vision: red, red, red.
Shen Wei closes his eyes, and there it is: the bright press of Zhao Yunlan’s energy against his ribs. He puts his hand to his chest as if he can really feel it, but under his palm is only the cloth of his own shirt.
Shen Wei hadn’t meant for Zhao Yunlan to find out, not yet. Not when Shen Wei hadn’t yet determined what parts he could avoid telling, and how he could disguise the worst parts of the rest of it. Not when Shen Wei still didn’t really understand, why using the Longevity Dial had shaken his internal energy the way it had, when he still barely had the language to explain what he needed to rebalance. Not when the best reassurance Shen Wei could come up with was, I’m used to it.
But it had happened, all the same.
Shen Wei reaches his hand back out, and in the message Zhao Yunlan picks his question back up, “—did you do that for me, Shen Wei?” A beat. “You don’t even know what this will do to you. How am I supposed to just gratefully accept this?" Something rising in his voice: "Who do you think I am, to you?” The sound of liquid moving in a bottle, and the close noise of Zhao Yunlan swallowing. The sharp clack as he sets the bottle down and says, almost apologetic, “I don’t— I don’t know how you can be so sure that I really am that person, Shen Wei. To be honest, I don’t think I am.”
“Zhao Yunlan,” Shen Wei whispers. His hand still on the machine, his fingertips dipped into that stripe of streetlight. “Oh, Kunlun.”
Shen Wei had called out sick from work for two consecutive days after he saw Kunlun in the window. After they met hands for the first time in ten thousand years, and Kunlun’s voice had said Shen Wei’s name like it was a stranger’s. Shen Wei hadn’t been sick. He’d been pacing in circles in his dorm, turning over and over the thought in his mind that they’d been living in the same city all this time, that for years they had been merely several kilometers apart, that they might have passed each other on opposite sides of a street a hundred times before, and simply not known.
Across time, Kunlun’s voice in the recording says, “I don’t even know if you’ll hear this,” and shifts back into silence, both of them waiting in the darkness until Zhao Yunlan says, “Just because I think you’d take a long walk across town to your office instead of holing up in your apartment doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it.”
Shen Wei's hand finds the back of his desk chair, and clamps down. His other hand goes to his pendant.
Again the slosh of liquid in the bottle, and Zhao Yunlan sighs. “Every time I think I’ve finally come to know you ...” Zhao Yunlan bites the sigh off into a laugh, quiet and humorless. When he speaks again, his voice is almost accusing. “But you, Shen Wei, you. Is there any piece of my life left that you don’t know yet? You’ve lived in my apartment, you’ve fed my cat. Hell, you’ve met my dad. You’ve walked through my entire life, you know you have, you were my eyes for weeks. The liberties I’ve let you take —”
In the silence, Shen Wei doesn’t breathe.
Zhao Yunlan says, “Shen Wei, I don’t know what it is about you. Even back when I didn’t trust you, I couldn’t help but keep going to you. Even then I couldn’t keep from — orbiting you.”
Zhao Yunlan’s voice has gone quiet, low and sober. The sound of it resonates through Shen Wei’s office and pierces right through him as Zhao Yunlan says, “I don’t believe you still don’t trust me. Don’t think I didn’t notice you spending more time at my place than at yours, all these weeks. You want to know me. You’ve done far too much for me to believe otherwise.”
Shen Wei closes his eyes.
Zhao Yunlan says, his voice a close sigh over the line, “I wish you’d let me know you, Shen Wei.” It’s like Zhao Yunlan is right here in the room, as he says, “Some days, that feels like the most I’ll ever be able to do.”
Shen Wei’s hand is clenched so tightly around his pendant that his fingers are going numb. He wants the same, with an intensity that threatens to ruin him. But he can’t act on it.
Walking in restless circles in his cramped teachers’ dorm, Shen Wei had promised himself: he wouldn’t force anything to happen. That wouldn’t be fair. Better for this man who looked like Kunlun to never be told what would happen, if he didn’t already know. Better for him not to be caged in by destiny. Better for him to remain able to move freely through his life without fate’s heavy hand against his back. Whoever Shen Wei had taken him to be at first glance, Zhao Yunlan doesn’t — shouldn’t — owe him that.
“One day,” Shen Wei whispers, without opening his eyes, standing alone in his office. “I promise you that you’ll understand one day, Zhao Yunlan. I — it won’t be like this forever.”
The words fall thinly into the darkness. On the answering machine, Zhao Yunlan’s message runs out in silence, and an automated voice says, You have no new messages. You have one old message. To listen to this message again, you may press —
Shen Wei fumbles across his desk for his answering machine, reaches out in the dark to play the message again. In the long stretch of silence, he presses the orb of his pendant against his lips, closes his eyes against the ache in his chest. And then the soft crackle of the recording, and he sinks, into the feeling of Kunlun’s voice, into the sound of Zhao Yunlan saying,
“Shen Wei.”