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What do you call dreams that are so visceral they no longer seem like fantasies? Things that leave the taste of blood in your mouth when you wake up? Mirages that fade the moment upon waking, leaving you grasping for the tailcoats of a ghost?
Dan Heng is fairly certain it’s not a ghost that he’s dreaming of, however. This is a man, whoever it is that keeps showing up in his dreams (or hallucinations, to be more apt—whatever twisted form of bloodletting this has become).
He only knows this because he is in a dream right now. Dan Heng, that is. Sometimes he is not Dan Heng. Sometimes it’s as if he’s crawled into the skin of another and has gotten so used to circulating that not Dan Heng’s oxygenated blood that he can’t tell himself from one person to the next.
But right now he is Dan Heng and the person opposite him is Yingxing. He will not remember this later.
Yingxing is blinking at him curiously. “Are you playing hide and seek, Yinyue-jun?” he asks teasingly, the words curling off of his tongue. He holds the fine porcelain wine cup over his bottom lip, but it’s not enough to hide the telling start of a smirk on his mouth. “Surely you’re too old for such childish activities.”
Yinyue-jun. Dan Heng does not know who that is, even if he knows who Yingxing is. “I’m Dan Heng,” he says. The words don’t ring the way they should. They don’t sound like the truth they should be. “I do not know a Yinyue-jun.”
Yingxing laughs, and the sound feels like one of those endless day-nights on the Astral Express, passing by gigantic stars that roil at the surface but can do nothing more but provide a gentle warmth. Dan Heng wants that sound curled under his tongue and is surprised by the intensity of his feelings.
“And here I thought you were done with the fun and games,” Yingxing says. He gestures at Dan Heng’s half of the small table that they share. “Has the wine gotten to you already? I thought you had a much higher tolerance than that.”
Oh. Dan Heng looks down to see his own cup of wine, deep scarlet and vermillion, and hardly a sip taken out of it. A singular crimson tear hanging at the lip of it is the only sign that it has even been touched. “I haven’t drunk any,” he says, pushing it aside. “I am not the—”
“I’ll be the judge of that,” Yingxing says, setting down his own cup with a steady hand and leaning over the table to grasp Dan Heng by the chin. It is then that Dan Heng realizes that Yingxing intends to kiss him and taste the wine on his tongue, so he wrenches himself out of the other’s grasp and half-covers his face with one hand, feeling himself go red.
“Shy now, aren’t we?” Yingxing muses.
Dan Heng averts his eyes. His eyelids feel heavy. “I think you’re mistaken. I’m sorry.”
“No,” Yingxing insists, “I’d know you even if you took on another body, to be sure. I don’t think you could ever hide from me.”
The words, meant to be lightly said, sound like a sentencing among the ringing in Dan Heng’s ears. He tries to stand, but suddenly finds himself dizzy, grasping onto the surface in front of him for support. The wine cup falls over with his momentum, spilling blood-like across the table.
“I’m,” Dan Heng says, or tries to say, because then his eyes roll to the back of his head and he wakes up.
And he is Dan Heng. Nothing more, nothing less.
The chess pieces stand tall against the checkered squares, even taller than Dan Feng. He looks up all around him and finds that the wooden pieces, usually small enough to be cupped in his hands, seem to have been multiplied many times in size.
With one hand on a pawn, he walks around the circumference of the piece, ears attuned to a slight shuffling sound that he can hear. There, on the other side of it, is Yingxing.
At least Dan Feng thinks this is Yingxing. His hair has grown dark and choppy. He’s holding a blade, standing heavily as if he enjoys the weight of it in his hands. Around the edges, he looks sharper than normal.
“Yingxing?” Dan Feng tries, tilting his head at him. “Where are we?”
The other looks at him consideringly and sheathes his blade. “My name is Ren. Who are you?”
Dan Feng startles, his heartbeat ratcheting up at the words. “But you look just like him,” he murmurs, and then, unable to help himself, draws closer so he can inspect Ren from a closer angle.
Ren looks at him through suspicious eyes, and that’s the most strikingly different thing about him—not the abrupt change in hair color or the weight of his stance as if he is ready to attack, but the mistrust and unrecognition. It makes Dan Feng’s pulse skip. Not in the way he is used to when he’s around Yingxing.
He swallows and steps back, allowing Ren his space. So this isn’t his Yingxing. “Do you know what this place is, Ren?”
He says the name but it feels wrong, wrong; he wants to scrape the taste of it off his tongue with a knife as if that will remove the strange feeling. Unpleasant and foreign and bitter.
Ren flashes a smile. “No, but are you up for a game? You take white. Go first.”
Dan Feng only wants to leave this place and find his Yingxing to make sure that he’s only just met some strange figment of his imagination, but perhaps he will humor him and try to find out more in the process.
“First? How gracious.” Dan Feng pushes a piece up.
“I like being a step behind. Makes the hunt that more fun.” The heavy sound of a piece being shifted somewhere a little ways away.
“The hunt? Is that what you’re here for?”
A dry laugh. “If you thought I’d give up all my secrets that easily, then you should think again.” There goes the sound of another chess piece. Dan Feng winds through the serpentine paths to see what move Ren has made and plays his turn in kind.
“I’m not prying,” Dan Feng says. “Just making conversation.”
“And who are you, then,” Ren asks, the sound traveling through all of the pieces around them. “Some kind of god? You’ve got those funny horns.”
“You look like a Xianzhou native,” Dan Feng says, frowning. “Shouldn’t you know who is a god and who isn’t? I suppose not knowing who I am is a more forgivable offense than that. I’m the high elder of the Vidyadhara.”
“Ooooh, special,” Ren says. It sounds mocking.
“Are you sure you don’t know who I am?”
The hollow scraping of another chess piece sounds first, and then Ren’s laugh, a little delayed, a little closer than Dan Feng had previously thought. “You think I’d play dumb on purpose? You must hold unimaginable power behind your hands, for the better or for the worse. It’d be foolish of me to make a fool of myself in front of someone like yourself, no?”
“Are you a native or not?” Dan Feng whips around, trying to track down where Ren is next. He’s starting to feel a prickle of uncomfortableness running down his spine.
“I’m a hunter,” Ren says, stepping out from behind the shadows of the tallest chess piece, the one carrying the crown. “Tracking down the king. I’ve got you. Checkmate. You thought this was all a game, Yinyue-jun? You thought that I—”
Dan Heng thinks he must have dreamed of a monster, if he even dreamed at all.
i.
This is the one where Ren stabs him.
The funny thing is that Dan Heng doesn’t even realize that he knows who Ren is until the sword is already halfway through his chest, puncturing something deep inside his body and punching out a choked-off gasp. The pain is brilliant and blinding, and Dan Heng can hardly see the person opposite from him but he knows this weapon. Knows the sharp edge of the blade so intimately that he can recognize it even when it’s in his own body.
But he’s never known pain like blinking through the tears in his eyes to see Ren across from him, smiling victoriously and a little unhinged, the sharp tip of his canines peeking over the blood red of his lip. The unfettered joy on his face is enough to white out everything else for Dan Heng.
He has never experienced this much pain in a dream before. Perhaps this means his past has come to cross paths with even his conscience.
Dan Heng remembers being loved. That can’t be right.
It isn’t correct, but it is a dream. In this dream, he is Dan Feng, and people call him Yinyue-jun. In this dream, Yingxing calls him sweetheart.
“Hey,” Yingxing says to him now from behind him. They’re sitting off on the port in the early morning. Fog swirls around them like steam rising under the cutoff. They like it here because this skiff landing port has long been abandoned. “Look to the left.”
Dan Feng is sitting in front of Yingxing, who is playing with his hair. It’s soothing for him. He likes the feeling of Yingxing’s fingers in his hair, pressing against his scalp, and in the cool morning air with the fog shrouding all else but them, he can pretend that they are alone in a cloud.
Off to the side, birds dip and dance through the mist like manta rays. “Isn’t it nice to see that we’re not alone?” Yingxing says. He draws his fingers through Dan Feng’s hair again, running from the top to the bottom. His fingers, rough and calloused, are always so gentle when he’s touching him.
“We’d only have to walk ten minutes to see other people again,” Dan Feng says, closing his eyes again.
Yingxing lets out an amused exhale; Dan Feng feels it brush past his ear and he shivers. “They don’t count. I’d rather you and I be away from them for the rest of my lifetime than ever see a bird again if it meant we could do away with all of our obligations.”
“Dream on,” Dan Feng says, and even as the words pass his lips he feels them rub the wrong way against the dream like oil to water. How could it be to dream within a dream?
Yingxing sighs. “I will. For as long as I can.” The repetitive motions of his hands drawing in and out of Dan Feng’s hair is so soothing that he almost forgets that he will have to wake up. He can already feel it slinking away from him, wisping away like smoke in grasping hands. He makes a fist with one hand and imagines clasping this moment there as if it is something tangible, this feeling with Yingxing where his heartbeat can finally settle down to rest.
Dan Feng tips his head back into Yingxing’s chest, and the hands in his hair still for a second before he leans down and presses a kiss into the top of his head, sweet and lingering and bruising all the same.
He wants to know Yingxing’s lips in places other than on his head. If he thinks hard enough, he can remember the imprint of his mouth against his own, on the expanse of his collarbone, all along his shoulder and down his fingertips. Even in this fading mirage.
Dan Feng doesn’t want this one dream to end. He is loved here.
It ends, as all things do. The good and the bad and the terrible—everything is always so terrifyingly finite.
ii.
This is the one where Ren tries to kill him.
Dan Heng coughs up a mouthful of blood, but there’s not enough force for it to make it all the way out, leaving a dripping trail down his chin and coating his tongue with metal. “You’re—”
Ren grins a little wider and shifts the blade a little bit, cutting him off. Dan Heng feels the shift of bone and a pop that he’s not sure he heard or felt. “Say what you will, because you only have a few more minutes to try at all.”
“You’re the ghost in my dreams,” Dan Heng says, his voice mangled.
Ren laughs once, a short burst of amusement. “Ghost is an odd way to put it. How could I be a ghost if I never die? Shouldn’t you know this already? Why is that so, Yinyue-jun?”
“My name is Dan Heng.”
Ren grunts as he moves closer to Dan Heng, forcing him onto the ground which makes the blade slide even more. He kneels down over him, watching the pain flash over his eyes, his gaze raking over his face. The grin never subsides.
“How dare you forget? How dare you forget what you did to me?”
The blood in Dan Heng’s mouth is starting to turn bitter and acidic. He coughs again, the red on his chin painted over anew. “I do not even know you, but you have taken so much from me.”
Ren looks up through his lashes, and that terrifying smile on his face flattens into one hard line. “I know you and I wish I didn’t.”
“Are you mine?” Dan Feng says, tracing a line from Yingxing’s forehead down to the chin. They’re lying so close to each other that he does not have to reach very far at all to touch skin, staring at each other as if they’d never tire of the sight.
Yingxing laughs, gently, closing his eyes so that his eyelashes flutter shut. Dan Feng wants to touch that part of him too, so he does, smiling at the way the other jerks back at the motion.
“I don’t belong to anybody, Yinyue-jun,” he says teasingly. “Ask again in a few years, though. All things erode with time.”
“Are you mine?” Dan Feng asks again, several skips down the dreamscape.
Ren growls at him, his hands chained behind him to the wall. He shakes against his restraints. “I’d sooner take my own life than call myself yours, but you’ve taken even that away from me.”
This person is not Yingxing but not not-Yingxing. Dan Feng doesn’t know what to make of it, but if he is not for Dan Feng, then he will let it go.
He longs to follow the jawline of this ghost, wants to hold him by his white-turned-dark hair, but he knows that things that do not belong to him are off-limits.
iii.
This is the one where Ren succeeds.
“Who am I to you?” Dan Heng demands.
“You’re living and dying by my blade,” Ren says mockingly. “You’re not in a position to ask questions.”
Ren runs his thumb along the sharp end of his sword until blood wells up. He brings the red-stained fingertip to Dan Heng’s lips and forces his mouth open, mixing ichor with ichor. The taste of it, shockingly pungent, makes Dan Heng think of a version of Ren with lighter hair and a kinder smile and hands that would never dream of hurting him. It makes him think of the taste of summer air in the Xianzhou Luofu.
“Are you remembering yet, Yinyue-jun?” Ren presses his thumb against Dan Heng’s tongue with so much force that it hurts before he finally removes it, only leaving the terrible remnants of that blood.
“Even if I was Dan Feng, I am not him anymore,” Dan Heng says through gritted teeth. “You cannot make me pay the price of a criminal whose face I do not know.”
Ren laughs at that, loud and roaring. “Wrong answer. There is always someone who has to pay the price, fulfill the debt. Otherwise, we’d be walking around with criminals who are only half-dead, and even animated corpses must know the hand of repentance.”
With that, he wrenches his sword out of Dan Heng’s chest with a terrible liquid sound, and as his heart grows more and more sluggish, blood running down his front, he can do nothing more but stare in front of him at Ren’s back turned to him as he walks away.
This is only a dream, but Dan Heng may as well be pierced to his mattress by a sword with the way he wakes up in absolute paralysis, unable to move a finger or toe for a long while.
This, here, is not a dream. His need to find March and Stelle is almost too real, adrenaline running through his body as he searches through the Xianzhou Luofu for his friends.
Dan Heng doesn’t remember having had to ride a skiff before, but the motion of the water surging underneath the vessel and its currents is oddly familiar to him. There are two figures out in the distance, growing clearer as he draws near. One a deep pink, the other midnight blue.
This is not a dream, but the dead are not supposed to walk. Ghosts are not supposed to be real. Creatures of fantasy that exist only in the mind’s eye should not appear in front of you, living and breathing with each rise and fall of the chest.
Dan Heng is starting to realize that none of his nights have ever been dreamless, only forgotten.
Dan Heng departs the skiff and walks forward. So this is the man that he has seen in the fog and darting between chess pieces. The one that has had his fingers in his hair and threatened him with a sword with the very same hands. He has to admit, he’s curious. Just what distinguishes a ghost from the living?
The man shifts from one foot to the other, his arms crossed over his chest. When he speaks, it's with the same deep timbre that Dan Heng remembers from all of his dreams—the very ones that he is starting to realize are interconnected.
“He’s here.”