1, 2, 3, 4 (Counting The Stars In Your Eyes)
Title: 1, 2, 3, 4 (Counting The Stars In Your Eyes)
Pairing: Wufan x Yixing
Rating: PG
Word count: 6,500 words
Genre: AU, angst, drama, fantasy, romance, scifi, tragedy
Length: Oneshot
A/N: Originally posted here, written for Rivimiera
Summary: Wufan has been yearning to meet his soul mate since forever. When fate brings them together, he discovers that there are reasons why Yixing had never bothered to meet him - the main reason being that he is dying.
Every single day was the same for Wufan. It was a routine of waking up alone, going to work to read the auras of people, translating the weird signs into understandable language so the Ministry could figure out who the soul mate of that very person would be. At the end of the day, he always went home alone, yet another day filled with disappointment. Every day started out with the small hope of finding his own soul mate but always got trampled at the end of the day like a dimly lit cigarette bud being crushed against the ground.
Ever since the day North-Korea had won over South-Korea, reuniting Korea, the Leader had tried to find a way to suppress the population without them opposing its reign. Like the Romans had said back in the days, there are two things needed to keep a population satisfied. Panem et circenses, bread and games. Korea had added a third thing to this list: amor, love. In the apocalypse of 21 December 2012, a virus had spread amidst the crashing waves of disaster after disaster. Miraculously, two thirds of the world population managed to survive. However, the celebrations of their survival were short lived because soon, people started to break out into fevers after the disasters.
The mechanism of the body developed something to defend themselves against it. In their battle against death, a new species of human had been created, superior to others. The new species had a better immune system and, above all, had powers everyone had only dared to dream about back in the days. However, passing the gene onto their off-spring had proven to be harder than initially thought. There were only a few people that were blessed with God’s gifts.
Now, fifty years later, Wufan was one of the people deemed as superior. Both his parents were people from less superiority but one of his ancestors should have had the gift of recognizing soul mates. A gift to help other people.
His gift was noticed when he was eleven years old and ever since then, Wufan had hoped to go back to his old life. One where he was just an ordinary boy with no special talents, one where he wasn’t someone men went to when they reached the age of twenty to be paired off to someone they’d soon understand better than anyone else in the world. It was especially hard for Wufan to find his soul mate - because even though he was gifted with this power, he couldn’t see his own aura. Only if he’d see the aura of his own soul mate or if someone else with his ability saw his soul mate and told him Wufan’s name, would he be able to know who it was.
That’s one of the reasons why he was working part time at a coffee shop in his spare time. Living a loveless life in a world where it was common to find your soul mate, in a world where he even helped people to find their soul mate, was something he refused to do. However, at the age of 24, his desperation was growing day by day. The only thing he could do was put his hopes on other people with his ability and on his own ability. Nowadays, nobody just started casual relationships, not when there was the certainty that at the age of twenty, someone would go to a Pairer who’d tell you the name of your soul mate. Relationships were just a waste of time.
To be quite honest, Wufan had almost given up the hope of ever meeting his soul mate.
It’s in periods like these when all hope is lost that love appears.
It’s not at his part time job nor is it via another Pairer. Wufan is in the elevator of his apartment, tiredness stuck to his bones like clothes after the rain, as he presses the button to the thirtieth floor. He was gradually falling into a slumbering depression, one that was threatening to eat him up from the inside. In this world where finding your soul mate was so easy, he was doomed with a gift that he couldn’t help himself with. Helping other people was great but Wufan couldn’t help but be a little bit selfish.
Just as the doors are closing from the elevator, there’s a voice screaming no, wait, just a moment! and there’s a hand stopping the doors from closing. “I’m sorry,” the man smiles, an apologize hidden in his voice.
“Don’t worry,” is what Wufan hears himself answering, smiling back politely.
It’s only when the elevator is stuck somewhere between the twentieth and tirtieth floor that Wufan elevates his eyes from the door to pay attention to the man. His face was unfamiliar and so was the presence of his aura. Slightly squinting his eyes, Wufan could read the soul of the man. Honest, hard-working, easy going yet stubborn, possessive, easily jealous. The sound indicating that the elevator had arrived at his floor makes Wufan snap out of it and he hurries outside.
That’s the first time he meets his soul mate though he doesn’t realize it.
The second time comes a week later when the seeds of desperation have already grown into trees, long branches reached out to the skies like brokenhearted humans raising their arms to the light blue heaven, questioning their God. This time it is Wufan who is too late and he reaches out with his hand - for once grateful for his long limbs - to prevent the doors from closing. “Sorry,” he huffs before making his way into the small space, trying to regain his cool composure.
“That’s okay, damn elevators these days,” the only man standing in the elevator answers, a smile on his face though it appeared like he tried to hide it.
Wufan laughs, “Are you new here? I haven’t seen you here before,” extending his hand, he continues, “I’m Wufan, thirtieth floor.”
“Yeah, I’ve moved here one month ago. It’s such a huge building - my stamina by far isn’t good enough to take the stairs but the elevators always seem to leave just when I enter the building,” the man laughs, accepting the extended hand, “Yixing. I live on the fifty-fourth floor.”
“Nice to meet you, do you like it around here? It’s hard to see people around my age here because,” it’s so damn expensive and people my age don’t earn that much money, “they prefer places closer to universities and such.” Wufan looks expectantly at the young man, eyes wandering slightly, and in that small moment of lost attention, his eyes focus on the radiating colours of his aura - almost like a habit after all those years - before his eyes unfocus and dig deeper, into the second layer, till his vision is swimming with numbers. He’s been reading auras for such a long time already that the numbers turn into letters without him even having the purpose to do so. 17286383048.
His breathing stops for a moment and everything around him appears to slow down.
“Umm, is there something wrong? I think this is your floor,” Yixing smiles awkwardly. “Umm, hello?”
Wufan blinks, the numbers and colours swirling and disappearing back into the body as soon as he loses his focus. “Sorry, what?” He looks around him and realizes that he had indeed missed his floor, the elevator already making its way up to the fifty-fourth. “Oh yeah, shit. I’m sorry I got sidetracked for a moment.”
“That’s okay, can happen to everyone. Would you like to hang out at my place for a moment?” Yixing laughs, “I, too, haven’t seen a lot of people my age around.”
It doesn’t take long for Wufan to say yes. It’s as if heart has started to pump harder, as if it had finally found a reason to beat for, the blood rushing through his veins and warming every corner of his body until his skin is left tingling and his cheeks are glowing. It’s as if heart has set free a thousand of butterflies, fluttering around in his stomach and making him feel as high as the floor that Yixing’s home was located on. He can’t ever remember feeling this way ever before. This emotion that could be described as utter glee. 17286383048. Wu Yi Fan. Yixing was his soul mate, the very person he had been looking for his whole life.
Yixing was polite at the beginning, cracking nervous jokes and laughing nervously but soon the tension disappeared from him shoulders and he relaxed, feeling more at ease until he was bursting with laughter. It is just past midnight when Wufan excuses himself because he’d love to sit there forever, spending eternity with the person that was connected to him the closest of all people on Earth but he knows that it’s just humanly impossible. On the other hand, he’s scared that this will turn out to be just a dream, that this figure called Yixing will escape him like sand between fingers. However, he didn’t want to force his presence on the guy yet, not when they technically still barely know each other and not - though he couldn’t care less - when he had to go to work tomorrow morning.
It was egoistic, now that he had found his own soul mate, that he wanted to stop helping others from finding theirs. But Wufan knew that the price for quitting his job was much higher than just having to live with his egoism. The government would take care of that.
For now, the question Wufan wanted answered was why Yixing had never approached him if he had ever had heard who his soul mate was. Had he been disappointed? Did he recognize Wufan as his soul mate? Maybe he thought he was just a friendly neighbour? This led to Wufan being only more careful in approaching the man.
It is only with their third meeting that he reveals his true nature to Yixing.
“I’ve always been wondering, though,” Wufan says, taking another sip of his beer bottle in the hope to drink in some courage before he continues, “How come you are a 21 year old man with nobody to live with? Haven’t you gone to a Pairer? Where’s your soul mate?”
“Well, doesn’t the same apply to you? You’re even older than I am,” Yixing says, a blush blossoming on his cheeks. The first thought that occurred to Wufan’s mind was that the question was rude - but a look on the amount of bottles on the table in front of him proved him otherwise. The man just couldn’t hold his liquor very well.
“If you tell me, I will tell you too,” Wufan says, finishing the remaining liquid in the bottle with just one gulp. He honestly needed more alcohol for this confession - his insides were burning with curiosity to the point that it became unbearable and yet he was too afraid to know. Four years of waiting for the man he knew he’d love more than himself. Four years. One year of pointless waiting. Why?
“Fine,” Yixing says after ten long heartbeats. It takes him another fifteen to finish his own bottle and yet another ten to start formulating the sentence to answer all questions. “I’m dying.”
And Wufan’s world crumbles under his hands, slipping between his fingers like sand.
Dying.
Death.
His soul mate was dying.
“The doctors told me I wouldn’t survive for another three years. I didn’t want to hurt my soul mate and thought it would be better like this,” Yixing says, his voice sounding carefree as ever but the impact is so big that Wufan is barely able to hear the words. “Now it’s your turn. Why are you still walking around alone on this planet?”
Wufan’s voice has disappeared. He opens his mouth, dry lips barely able to move to pronounce the words he wants to. His language suddenly sounded foreign even to him. He nervously licks his lips, forcing them to move and pronounce foreign sounds. “Because I’m a Pairer.”
“Oh I see,” Yixing nods, “Finding your soul mate would be very hard for you.”
“Yeah, if it would have been a girl. But my soul mate is not,” Wufan says, his brow furrowing into a deep frown. “Yet, while I waited for him unconditionally, he never came looking for me…”
After a long silence, Wufan continues, “Because he’s dying.”
And with tears in his eyes, he gets up, tall legs not strong enough to carry the new weight added onto his body, crashing all his bones and vital organs. “While I was waiting for you, dying to meet you, I had no idea you would be avoiding me like this. And now, our time is shorter than ever. How could you be so selfish?”
He isn’t able to prevent the hot tears from streaming down his face - neither is he able to watch as realization dawns upon Yixing’s face. Get out of here. He had to get out of here. He had to get somewhere where there was air, space, where there wasn’t an iron grip on his throat, causing his eyes to tear up and to make breathing be so painful.
Tears blinding his eyes, he turns around and dashes through the door, leaving Yixing behind him before the man is able to formulate a coherent sentence. Impatiently, Wufan is already pressing the elevator button but it takes too long, too long of his precious time because now he realizes how important time actually is, and he runs down the stairs, his long legs skipping two steps at a time.
By the time he has reached his floor, his breathing is ragged and his cheeks have turned wet. His hands are trembling when he reaches into his pockets, digging the keys out to open the door. He doesn’t know whether it’s because of tears or sweat; all he knows is that something inside of him is crushing his chest into a pulverized mess. Pain, fear, panic and a crushing sadness are al coming together somewhere in his chest, his stomach, his head, his body, until he lurches forward to the toilet.
The alcohol along with his dinner is leaving his body but after one, two, three times of throwing up, he’s still feeling nauseous and Wufan can’t get rid of this sickening feeling. He clutches the toilet as if it’s his lifeline and maybe, somehow, it is.
“Wufan, open the door,” is what he hears above the sound of the toilet flushing but Wufan ignores it. Now that the alcohol is out of his system, he feels even sicker. He closes his eyes, head resting on the cool surface of the wall of the room and he hums a small melody to himself. Forget, forget that this has ever happened. Pretend that this was just a dream, that the alcohol was just blurring the lines between reality and dream. The hangover of tomorrow would be proof enough for that. Forget, forget, forget.
(Yixing had been wise enough to realize that sometimes, ignorance is bliss too. It was too late when Wufan, too, realized.)
The pounding on his door stops when light is already breaking through the curtains.
That morning Wufan refuses to go to work.
He spends the day after that in his bed too.
On the third day he finds a note slipped under the door, messy handwriting scribbled on the white paper. Let me explain. Please. - Yixing. The words were followed by a series of numbers - a telephone number.
Wufan stuffs the small piece of paper in his pocket, sighing as he puts on his shoes to go to work. Because of him, his colleagues had a harder time. The amount of Pairers was limited - you could count them on one hand. If someone would be absent, either the huge waiting lists would increase even more or the other Pairers would be assigned more people than they originally were meant to have. Having been absent for three days just because thinking of the word soul mate triggered an unconceivable pain to hit him in the face and spread through his body like blood in his veins was too selfish.
Watching the young men appear in front of him only for him to read their auras, to tell them what the name and date of birth of their soul mate was while the heart wrenching knowledge was there, lying on the bottom of his stomach like an anchor in the sea, weighing him down, until he felt exhausted with self-pity.
It was selfish - for him to be jealous of the luck of other people, people who did have their soul mates, people who could still live happily ever after with them while his time was running out, while he was just waiting for a time bomb to explode.
So that night, Wufan ignores his pride and dials the scribbled number.
“Hello? Is this Yixing?” he asks, ignoring his shaky breath and the heartbeat somewhere in his throat, “Are you free to meet up now?”
“Wufan? Yes! Where are you now? I’ll come to you immediately.”
Later that night, he’s surprisingly composed. He hears all the reasons he has never known and probably would have never wanted to know.
“Six months before my twentieth birthday, I was diagnosed with Adrenoleukodystrophy, better known as X-ALD. It’s an illness in the brain that’s incurable. When I first heard of it, my world came tumbling down - my life was just about to get started, I could almost almost meet my soul mate, I just had to wait for a little six months. Don’t you think everyone is in love with just the simple thought of loving someone? At that time, I was, too.
Doesn’t everyone want someone who completely understands them? Someone who will reassuringly stroke their hair, someone who will lull your worries away, someone who is as steady as a rock when you need it but also someone who will make you laugh, who’ll make your heart flutter until you’re afraid that it might thump out of your chest.
I was living in that hallucination. I wanted to fall in love like everyone I knew.
You can’t imagine how awful I felt when not only that dream was crushed but every other dream that had ever passed my mind too. Maybe I could love someone before I died - but we’d never grow old together and never would I turn gray or wrinkly nor could I see that happening to my soul mate either. I would never be able to get settled, to get a well-paid job, to create a family. The amount of sunrises I could still see were limited, the worth of every single second had suddenly increased by millions.
I honestly couldn’t think at that moment. So many thoughts came rushing through my mind, one even more selfish than the other one. I honestly only had egoistic thoughts at the moment - but isn’t that only human when you’ve just heard you’re incurably ill?
It was only later that I decided not to contact you at all. I was overthinking so much - wasting my precious time thinking about little things. But I was sure about this. Contrarily to all the selfish thoughts I had had, I thought it would be better not to contact you at all. To be selfless for a change. How selfish would it be for me to meet you, to love you, to make you love me, when we only had just a few months left? You would be the one left crushed, devastated - it wouldn’t be me hurting the most but it would be you. You would have to continue living after knowing me for just a few months. I’d be part of just a fraction of your lifetime but the impact of my presence would be enough to leave you reeling in pain at the simple thought of my name - or maybe you’d even forget me completely.
I would live with no regrets if I would have decided to meet you. But instead, you’d be the one to end up with all the sorrow and pain.
I’m sorry, I just couldn’t do it,” Yixing says, reaching out his hand to gently touch Wufan’s trembling one. There’s a sad look in his eyes, “I never wanted this to happen. It was all because I wanted the best for you. The doctor told me I could live for two more years before my vision and hearing would start to decline, three if I were to be lucky. One thing was sure - I’d be in a vegetative state within four years.
Up till now, the treatment is going well. Technology is getting better and better… but I still couldn’t meet you, not when I knew that chances of recovery were slim to zero. I moved here because they are experimenting with a new treatment here close in the neighbourhood. I never expected to meet my soul mate here… I’m so sorry for putting you through this - I only wanted to spare you the pain.”
And then, after a long silence, Yixing takes a deep breath and continues, “Walk away now. Cut all ties with me. Do it if you want. I’m not going to take this choice away from you once again - not now you know. I can disappear from your life if you want, spare you the pain, and when you’ll hear that I’ve died, it won’t be as if someone punched a hole through your heart but instead it’ll be as if someone just hit you lightly on the arm. It would be the appropriate amount of pain for someone you’d hardly know. The pain won’t be that gut-wrenching and you’d be able to cope with it.
I won’t be angry - be selfish, don’t think of me and spare yourself the pain.”
Wufan stares at Yixing, his brown eyes giving nothing away but determination. “You judged the situation wrongly. You weren’t acting selflessly… but with you taking away all of my options, with you recklessly deciding for me - that was being selfish. You made me wait for you every day since I’d turned twenty; every day started out with a hopeful flicker, every day I was thinking maybe today will be the day, maybe maybe maybe only to be disappointed when the sun set. Your decision could not have been more selfish.
So I’ll be greedy too. Let’s do this. I don’t care about the pain that might come later, I’m no masochist but all I want is to experience the feeling of true love, how short that experience might even be. Let’s do this. Let’s live life from day to day - there’s no tomorrow, just today.”
The small smile Yixing tries to suppress doesn’t escape from Wufan’s attention. “Okay, let’s do this.”
Their first date is a simple one, just at the coffee shop nearby their house where they warm their cold hands holding the mugs with hot chocolate. It’s where Wufan usually spends his time during work time listening to the rhythmic sounds of rain ticking against the windows and staring at the dark clouds with rays of sunshine peeking through. This time, he ignores all that and finds himself absorbed into the melodic sounds of Yixing’s voice and the way Yixing’s eyes crinkle when he laughs, the deep dimple that appears when he smiles, the way he grimaces, the way he looks for the right words to express his thoughts.
(And for Wufan, there are no words to express this turmoil of feelings inside his body. There was no word he knew that could describe this feeling of wholeheartedly loving someone, of the butterflies fluttering around in his stomach, of this feeling that kept tugging on the corners of his lips. He wished the Chinese language had as much words for ‘love’ as the Eskimos had for ‘snow’.)
They kiss on their second date. Amidst flushed cheeks, cold noses, it’s soft lips pressed against cold ones, warm tongue brushing past the other, and teeth awkwardly clashing against one other. It’s an explosion of heart beats and butterflies and Wufan’s lips are already stretching into a smile, as he pulls Yixing closer to his own body, hoping this moment would never end.
(Unfortunately, it does, like all things in life.)
On their third date, Yixing shows him his sketches. Wufan’s jaw drops when he sees the thin pencil strokes forming messily drawn faces. Only the eyes, the eyes were drawn in details, the way the light fell onto the pupil, the way they shone and sparkled, the way the irises were composed of small black lines and fading colours.
“Oh wow,” Wufan says, almost forgetting how to breathe, “You really have a lot of talent. This is beautiful.”
“Thanks,” Yixing smiles, a faint blush colouring his cheeks. “I… You’ve been the only thing on my mind lately… I-I tried to draw you but nothing, nothing, that comes from my hands is able to capture the perfection that you are to me.”
But when he shows Wufan the drawings - no sketches this time - he can’t believe his eyes. “What are you talking about?” he says, eyes taking in the unbelievable talent Yixing has. It was almost as if the drawing came to life, as if he was really looking at himself in a mirror. Only, that wasn’t him, just someone that looked like him but was far more perfect. Eyes soulful yet gentle, carrying so much depth that Wufan finds himself curious for its secrets, hair unkempt, messy, skin smoother than he has ever believed his own was. “This is… perfect. More than I’ll ever be.”
“Stop lying,” Yixing says before he presses his lips onto Wufan’s. “You’re far more perfect than this to me.”
(Later that night, Wufan does an attempt at drawing Yixing too but instead, he ends up drawing something that looks more like a rhinoceros and an uneven-eyed Chinese person mashed up together. He crumbles the paper in frustration but Yixing laughs and flattens the paper with his hand, telling him that he likes it and wants to keep it.)
“Why are you living here alone when there’s a possibility of you collapsing every moment? Why is there nobody living with you?” Wufan asks, arm around Yixing’s shoulder to press their bodies closer. They’re back at the coffee shop, sitting close on the couch in front of the fireplace. They’re watching the little flames in the fireplace come to life and retreat to the wood, relive and retreat. “Aren’t you scared something might happen?”
“My parents couldn’t come along; you see, their job is very important to them. They shed blood, sweat and tears to get to the position they are in now and it’d be impossible for them to give it up to move with me - and I totally understand them. Don’t they have to continue their life when I am gone? They sent me here in the hope for recovery. The hospital put a miniscule high tech device into my body and with that, they can see the effects of the cure, can see if it’s working and at the same time, they can also immediately take any action when they see it’s going the wrong way. They could be at my place within minutes if they’d wanted,” Yixing rubs his eyes sleepily and then sighs before he straightens his back, freeing himself from Wufan’s arm resting on his shoulders.
“The doctors estimate that I’ll live only for six more months. The cure is not working. My hearing is already deteriorating, slowly now but it’ll go faster and faster soon. Soon, my vision will follow and it won’t take long for me to turn into someone that’s only kept alive by machines. I’m…” Wufan sees the hand of Yixing slowly inching closer until the finger tips touch his cheek gently, his eyes filled by a look of sorrow, “…sorry.”
And Wufan swallows his tears away, keeping this façade of strength alive when in reality he is just a person crumbling to pieces.
“No, don’t be. Fight. There’s still hope. You won’t need your hearing nor your vision to feel this,” he leans in, slowly pressing his lips onto Yixing’s as he tries to ignore the burning hot tears in his own eyes, “nor do you need it to know that I’ll be there for you, that I love you.”
And Yixing smiles, still a sorrowful look in his eyes.
“Today. We promised to live day by day,” Wufan says.
(But he can’t help but be afraid of tomorrow. Because every passing day meant one day less to spend with Yixing.)
Wufan moves in with Yixing after a month since going out with each other. “I can’t sleep at night because I’m worried sick. What will happen if something happens to you and nobody’s there?” he says, a bag with his toothbrush, skin care products and other necessary things in his hand, barging his way into the apartment and ignoring the perplexed expression on Yixing’s face. “It’s not a big thing, if I need something, I can just go downstairs and get it.”
Later that night, Yixing laughs, saying that it’s just as if they’re on a school trip; as if they were roommates or maybe friends sneaking into each other’s rooms, exhilarated with adrenaline.
(That smile soon disappears when he discovers how long it takes for Wufan to take care of his skin.)
It’s only after two months of knowing Yixing that Wufan really experiences what it is like to live with someone that suffers from X-ALD. More and more often, the sentences that Yixing tries to pronounce stop making any sense anymore, sounds entangled with intentions. More and more often does Yixing put his glasses on, trying to hide the real cause behind this from Wufan but Wufan isn’t stupid. He can’t suppress the unimaginable surge of sadness when he realizes that the frequency of Yixing asking him if he has seen his glasses somewhere around because he lost them again becomes less and less too - but only because these glasses are always resting on Yixing’s nose now.
The day after, Yixing wakes him up around seven to watch the sunrise with him. It’s exceptionally cold for the season and they’re sitting on the balcony of Yixing’s apartment, trembling bodies close to each other as their breaths leave tiny clouds in the air. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yixing asks, eyes sad as he watches the colours blend into each other, blue to purple to red to blue again, evading Wufan’s questioning look, “The way we still hope. Every day I wake up and I feel another spark of hope in my body, thanking God for giving me another day to live. They say that after darkness there will be light just like after the night there will be day. They say we have to thank the darkness because without it, what meaning would light have? We wouldn’t be able to realize what light is because there’d be nothing to compare it with. They taught us to hope.”
And yet, there ís no hope.
They’re both thinking the same thing. Wufan wants to ban the words out of his head, deny them and pretend that they’re all lies, so instead he goes in for a kiss, hard and rough and needy because he needs Yixing like he needs oxygen.
(When he refuses to break loose from the kiss even though black dots are starting to fill his vision, he realizes that maybe, he needed Yixing even more than oxygen.)
“Doctor told me they’d intensify treatment,” Yixing tells him two weeks later. It’s incredibly how badly his condition had gotten in just fourteen days - never before had Wufan thought that such a small amount of time could have such a big impact. “It now get worse, really bad - he told me. Only faster and faster. They’ll try to slow down.”
Closing his eyes, taking a deep breath in and slowly breathing out, Wufan tries to regain his composure. Everything, everything, was coming awfully close now. “Don’t…” he whispers, pulling Yixing close to him. “Don’t talk. I… Let’s just… just…”
Just what? Wufan doesn’t even know himself. All he knows is that he doesn’t want to think about it, that he just wants to live in the here and now forever and ever, that he just wants them to stay the same forever and ever. He wants to capture this moment, the exploding love and Yixing, Yixing, Yixing above all of them.
(That night, he has Yixing all to himself, bodies pressed close to each other, slow and gentle movements and an explosion of love and pleasure. In that small moment it doesn’t matter that they can’t communicate through language because the language of love is a universal one and Wufan forgets, just lives in the here and now. It just doesn’t last forever and ever.)
Wufan softly touches Yixing’s forehead, brushing the hair out of his eyes. In the past two weeks Yixing’s speech has gotten so bad that Wufan was basically able to see his brain looking for words that don’t exist anymore in his vocabulary. It’s like the words are disappearing through quicksand, like some virus has infiltrated his brain and deleting everything in the language department. And somehow, that’s quite true as well.
“Don’t feel sad,” Wufan tells him, smiling encouragingly though he knows the soft edges of sadness in his eyes betray him. “Didn’t I tell you earlier? It doesn’t mean anything if you are slowly forgetting. As long as you remember that you’re not alone, that you always have me to rely on, as long as you remember that, it’s fine… Language is not the only way on the world to communicate with each other.
I can see your aura; yellow for joy, pink for love. Communication can happen through so many ways.”
Kissing Yixing, he repeats the words I love you, I love you, I love you over and over in his head.
Wufan’s heart skips a beat when he gets home after work, house empty and cold. In his mind, he runs over and over the possibilities; maybe an appointment with the hospital? No, not that he knew of. Maybe an appointment with a friend? No, Yixing would have told him. Impatiently, he waits for another hour filled with repeated calls to Yixing’s number, heart beating faster than the beep on the other line, before he finally gives up on trying to contact him and calls to the hospital.
However, his heart promptly comes to a stop when he hears the earnest voice on the other line, “Zhang Yixing? I’m sorry, sir, but maybe it’d be better to tell you this in person.”
Doctor Kim was quite handsome and friendly, his blue aura showing balance and support in an uncertain world like this. The look of sympathy in his eyes was awful. “Mr. Zhang just had an epileptic seizure. We were at his apartment within two minutes but we still couldn’t prevent mr. Zhang from losing his ability to speak. His vision and hearing have been greatly damaged by the fit as well but maybe it’d be better if you’d see the damage for yourself.”
But there’s something about that moment, about the white door and the name plate with Zhang Yixing scribbled on it and the uncertainty that was lingering around the corner that made Wufan cringe at just the thought of stepping inside. So instead, he asks, his eyes still fixed on the name plate, “How… how long?”
A silence follows, a silence that’s given to him because he knows doctor Kim is inaudibly asking him ‘are you sure you want to know now?’ but he doesn’t retreat. He’d hear it sooner or later so what difference would it make now? Doctor Kim takes a deep breath before saying, “If we were to keep him alive artificially, six months at its most. But in all honesty, he has one more month left before he loses his hearing and vision as well. I’m really sorry we couldn’t do more.”
One more month.
One month.
One month.
“I’m-I’m sorry, could you leave me alone for a moment?” Wufan says, voice trembling. He suddenly feels so small, feels like the world, great and humongous, is coming down on him, while he is small, so so small.
Instead of going to the one person he cares the most about in the whole world, he gets up after a few minutes and rushes out - air, air, he needed fresh air.
In the cold, he grabs his hair in frustration, cries until the tears freeze on his cheeks and screams until his throat tightens around his voice and it becomes nothing more than a shrill shrieking. He felt so wronged, so angry at the world. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There should have been so much more time, they should have been healthy, should have grown old together, they should have lived, laughed, loved. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all.
Later, he walks into Yixing’s room. The apologetic smile that breaks through on Yixing’s face makes Wufan cringe inside but he doesn’t let it show on the outside and instead, he forces himself to smile back even though his red eyes and runny nose betray him. “It’s okay,” he says, cold hand reaching out to hold Yixing’s warm one, “It’s alright. Everything’s going to be okay.”
But when Yixing reaches out his other hand to gently cope Wufan’s cheek, a finger wiping away a tear that seemed to have escaped from his iron will, Wufan can’t pretend anymore. He’d thought that he had cried his heart out already but there seemed to be no limit to his tears. Instead, the pitch-black sadness inside him suffocates him, and the tears start to run over his cheeks, until he is the one that has to be comforted by Yixing. “I’m sorry,” he sobs, “I should be the one comforting you. I’m… I’m sorry.” Sorry that he couldn’t give him more strength, sorry that he couldn’t prevent this from happening, sorry that Yixing was hurting even more because Wufan had been so driven to start this relationship.
But Yixing leans forward, softly kissing his tears away and Wufan understands.
It’s okay.
And for a split second, with Yixing’s arms wrapped around him, giving him strength and comfort, he believes it.
Pairing: Wufan x Yixing
Rating: PG
Word count: 6,500 words
Genre: AU, angst, drama, fantasy, romance, scifi, tragedy
Length: Oneshot
A/N: Originally posted here, written for Rivimiera
Summary: Wufan has been yearning to meet his soul mate since forever. When fate brings them together, he discovers that there are reasons why Yixing had never bothered to meet him - the main reason being that he is dying.
Every single day was the same for Wufan. It was a routine of waking up alone, going to work to read the auras of people, translating the weird signs into understandable language so the Ministry could figure out who the soul mate of that very person would be. At the end of the day, he always went home alone, yet another day filled with disappointment. Every day started out with the small hope of finding his own soul mate but always got trampled at the end of the day like a dimly lit cigarette bud being crushed against the ground.
Ever since the day North-Korea had won over South-Korea, reuniting Korea, the Leader had tried to find a way to suppress the population without them opposing its reign. Like the Romans had said back in the days, there are two things needed to keep a population satisfied. Panem et circenses, bread and games. Korea had added a third thing to this list: amor, love. In the apocalypse of 21 December 2012, a virus had spread amidst the crashing waves of disaster after disaster. Miraculously, two thirds of the world population managed to survive. However, the celebrations of their survival were short lived because soon, people started to break out into fevers after the disasters.
The mechanism of the body developed something to defend themselves against it. In their battle against death, a new species of human had been created, superior to others. The new species had a better immune system and, above all, had powers everyone had only dared to dream about back in the days. However, passing the gene onto their off-spring had proven to be harder than initially thought. There were only a few people that were blessed with God’s gifts.
Now, fifty years later, Wufan was one of the people deemed as superior. Both his parents were people from less superiority but one of his ancestors should have had the gift of recognizing soul mates. A gift to help other people.
His gift was noticed when he was eleven years old and ever since then, Wufan had hoped to go back to his old life. One where he was just an ordinary boy with no special talents, one where he wasn’t someone men went to when they reached the age of twenty to be paired off to someone they’d soon understand better than anyone else in the world. It was especially hard for Wufan to find his soul mate - because even though he was gifted with this power, he couldn’t see his own aura. Only if he’d see the aura of his own soul mate or if someone else with his ability saw his soul mate and told him Wufan’s name, would he be able to know who it was.
That’s one of the reasons why he was working part time at a coffee shop in his spare time. Living a loveless life in a world where it was common to find your soul mate, in a world where he even helped people to find their soul mate, was something he refused to do. However, at the age of 24, his desperation was growing day by day. The only thing he could do was put his hopes on other people with his ability and on his own ability. Nowadays, nobody just started casual relationships, not when there was the certainty that at the age of twenty, someone would go to a Pairer who’d tell you the name of your soul mate. Relationships were just a waste of time.
To be quite honest, Wufan had almost given up the hope of ever meeting his soul mate.
It’s in periods like these when all hope is lost that love appears.
It’s not at his part time job nor is it via another Pairer. Wufan is in the elevator of his apartment, tiredness stuck to his bones like clothes after the rain, as he presses the button to the thirtieth floor. He was gradually falling into a slumbering depression, one that was threatening to eat him up from the inside. In this world where finding your soul mate was so easy, he was doomed with a gift that he couldn’t help himself with. Helping other people was great but Wufan couldn’t help but be a little bit selfish.
Just as the doors are closing from the elevator, there’s a voice screaming no, wait, just a moment! and there’s a hand stopping the doors from closing. “I’m sorry,” the man smiles, an apologize hidden in his voice.
“Don’t worry,” is what Wufan hears himself answering, smiling back politely.
It’s only when the elevator is stuck somewhere between the twentieth and tirtieth floor that Wufan elevates his eyes from the door to pay attention to the man. His face was unfamiliar and so was the presence of his aura. Slightly squinting his eyes, Wufan could read the soul of the man. Honest, hard-working, easy going yet stubborn, possessive, easily jealous. The sound indicating that the elevator had arrived at his floor makes Wufan snap out of it and he hurries outside.
That’s the first time he meets his soul mate though he doesn’t realize it.
The second time comes a week later when the seeds of desperation have already grown into trees, long branches reached out to the skies like brokenhearted humans raising their arms to the light blue heaven, questioning their God. This time it is Wufan who is too late and he reaches out with his hand - for once grateful for his long limbs - to prevent the doors from closing. “Sorry,” he huffs before making his way into the small space, trying to regain his cool composure.
“That’s okay, damn elevators these days,” the only man standing in the elevator answers, a smile on his face though it appeared like he tried to hide it.
Wufan laughs, “Are you new here? I haven’t seen you here before,” extending his hand, he continues, “I’m Wufan, thirtieth floor.”
“Yeah, I’ve moved here one month ago. It’s such a huge building - my stamina by far isn’t good enough to take the stairs but the elevators always seem to leave just when I enter the building,” the man laughs, accepting the extended hand, “Yixing. I live on the fifty-fourth floor.”
“Nice to meet you, do you like it around here? It’s hard to see people around my age here because,” it’s so damn expensive and people my age don’t earn that much money, “they prefer places closer to universities and such.” Wufan looks expectantly at the young man, eyes wandering slightly, and in that small moment of lost attention, his eyes focus on the radiating colours of his aura - almost like a habit after all those years - before his eyes unfocus and dig deeper, into the second layer, till his vision is swimming with numbers. He’s been reading auras for such a long time already that the numbers turn into letters without him even having the purpose to do so. 17286383048.
His breathing stops for a moment and everything around him appears to slow down.
“Umm, is there something wrong? I think this is your floor,” Yixing smiles awkwardly. “Umm, hello?”
Wufan blinks, the numbers and colours swirling and disappearing back into the body as soon as he loses his focus. “Sorry, what?” He looks around him and realizes that he had indeed missed his floor, the elevator already making its way up to the fifty-fourth. “Oh yeah, shit. I’m sorry I got sidetracked for a moment.”
“That’s okay, can happen to everyone. Would you like to hang out at my place for a moment?” Yixing laughs, “I, too, haven’t seen a lot of people my age around.”
It doesn’t take long for Wufan to say yes. It’s as if heart has started to pump harder, as if it had finally found a reason to beat for, the blood rushing through his veins and warming every corner of his body until his skin is left tingling and his cheeks are glowing. It’s as if heart has set free a thousand of butterflies, fluttering around in his stomach and making him feel as high as the floor that Yixing’s home was located on. He can’t ever remember feeling this way ever before. This emotion that could be described as utter glee. 17286383048. Wu Yi Fan. Yixing was his soul mate, the very person he had been looking for his whole life.
Yixing was polite at the beginning, cracking nervous jokes and laughing nervously but soon the tension disappeared from him shoulders and he relaxed, feeling more at ease until he was bursting with laughter. It is just past midnight when Wufan excuses himself because he’d love to sit there forever, spending eternity with the person that was connected to him the closest of all people on Earth but he knows that it’s just humanly impossible. On the other hand, he’s scared that this will turn out to be just a dream, that this figure called Yixing will escape him like sand between fingers. However, he didn’t want to force his presence on the guy yet, not when they technically still barely know each other and not - though he couldn’t care less - when he had to go to work tomorrow morning.
It was egoistic, now that he had found his own soul mate, that he wanted to stop helping others from finding theirs. But Wufan knew that the price for quitting his job was much higher than just having to live with his egoism. The government would take care of that.
For now, the question Wufan wanted answered was why Yixing had never approached him if he had ever had heard who his soul mate was. Had he been disappointed? Did he recognize Wufan as his soul mate? Maybe he thought he was just a friendly neighbour? This led to Wufan being only more careful in approaching the man.
It is only with their third meeting that he reveals his true nature to Yixing.
“I’ve always been wondering, though,” Wufan says, taking another sip of his beer bottle in the hope to drink in some courage before he continues, “How come you are a 21 year old man with nobody to live with? Haven’t you gone to a Pairer? Where’s your soul mate?”
“Well, doesn’t the same apply to you? You’re even older than I am,” Yixing says, a blush blossoming on his cheeks. The first thought that occurred to Wufan’s mind was that the question was rude - but a look on the amount of bottles on the table in front of him proved him otherwise. The man just couldn’t hold his liquor very well.
“If you tell me, I will tell you too,” Wufan says, finishing the remaining liquid in the bottle with just one gulp. He honestly needed more alcohol for this confession - his insides were burning with curiosity to the point that it became unbearable and yet he was too afraid to know. Four years of waiting for the man he knew he’d love more than himself. Four years. One year of pointless waiting. Why?
“Fine,” Yixing says after ten long heartbeats. It takes him another fifteen to finish his own bottle and yet another ten to start formulating the sentence to answer all questions. “I’m dying.”
And Wufan’s world crumbles under his hands, slipping between his fingers like sand.
Dying.
Death.
His soul mate was dying.
“The doctors told me I wouldn’t survive for another three years. I didn’t want to hurt my soul mate and thought it would be better like this,” Yixing says, his voice sounding carefree as ever but the impact is so big that Wufan is barely able to hear the words. “Now it’s your turn. Why are you still walking around alone on this planet?”
Wufan’s voice has disappeared. He opens his mouth, dry lips barely able to move to pronounce the words he wants to. His language suddenly sounded foreign even to him. He nervously licks his lips, forcing them to move and pronounce foreign sounds. “Because I’m a Pairer.”
“Oh I see,” Yixing nods, “Finding your soul mate would be very hard for you.”
“Yeah, if it would have been a girl. But my soul mate is not,” Wufan says, his brow furrowing into a deep frown. “Yet, while I waited for him unconditionally, he never came looking for me…”
After a long silence, Wufan continues, “Because he’s dying.”
And with tears in his eyes, he gets up, tall legs not strong enough to carry the new weight added onto his body, crashing all his bones and vital organs. “While I was waiting for you, dying to meet you, I had no idea you would be avoiding me like this. And now, our time is shorter than ever. How could you be so selfish?”
He isn’t able to prevent the hot tears from streaming down his face - neither is he able to watch as realization dawns upon Yixing’s face. Get out of here. He had to get out of here. He had to get somewhere where there was air, space, where there wasn’t an iron grip on his throat, causing his eyes to tear up and to make breathing be so painful.
Tears blinding his eyes, he turns around and dashes through the door, leaving Yixing behind him before the man is able to formulate a coherent sentence. Impatiently, Wufan is already pressing the elevator button but it takes too long, too long of his precious time because now he realizes how important time actually is, and he runs down the stairs, his long legs skipping two steps at a time.
By the time he has reached his floor, his breathing is ragged and his cheeks have turned wet. His hands are trembling when he reaches into his pockets, digging the keys out to open the door. He doesn’t know whether it’s because of tears or sweat; all he knows is that something inside of him is crushing his chest into a pulverized mess. Pain, fear, panic and a crushing sadness are al coming together somewhere in his chest, his stomach, his head, his body, until he lurches forward to the toilet.
The alcohol along with his dinner is leaving his body but after one, two, three times of throwing up, he’s still feeling nauseous and Wufan can’t get rid of this sickening feeling. He clutches the toilet as if it’s his lifeline and maybe, somehow, it is.
“Wufan, open the door,” is what he hears above the sound of the toilet flushing but Wufan ignores it. Now that the alcohol is out of his system, he feels even sicker. He closes his eyes, head resting on the cool surface of the wall of the room and he hums a small melody to himself. Forget, forget that this has ever happened. Pretend that this was just a dream, that the alcohol was just blurring the lines between reality and dream. The hangover of tomorrow would be proof enough for that. Forget, forget, forget.
(Yixing had been wise enough to realize that sometimes, ignorance is bliss too. It was too late when Wufan, too, realized.)
The pounding on his door stops when light is already breaking through the curtains.
That morning Wufan refuses to go to work.
He spends the day after that in his bed too.
On the third day he finds a note slipped under the door, messy handwriting scribbled on the white paper. Let me explain. Please. - Yixing. The words were followed by a series of numbers - a telephone number.
Wufan stuffs the small piece of paper in his pocket, sighing as he puts on his shoes to go to work. Because of him, his colleagues had a harder time. The amount of Pairers was limited - you could count them on one hand. If someone would be absent, either the huge waiting lists would increase even more or the other Pairers would be assigned more people than they originally were meant to have. Having been absent for three days just because thinking of the word soul mate triggered an unconceivable pain to hit him in the face and spread through his body like blood in his veins was too selfish.
Watching the young men appear in front of him only for him to read their auras, to tell them what the name and date of birth of their soul mate was while the heart wrenching knowledge was there, lying on the bottom of his stomach like an anchor in the sea, weighing him down, until he felt exhausted with self-pity.
It was selfish - for him to be jealous of the luck of other people, people who did have their soul mates, people who could still live happily ever after with them while his time was running out, while he was just waiting for a time bomb to explode.
So that night, Wufan ignores his pride and dials the scribbled number.
“Hello? Is this Yixing?” he asks, ignoring his shaky breath and the heartbeat somewhere in his throat, “Are you free to meet up now?”
“Wufan? Yes! Where are you now? I’ll come to you immediately.”
Later that night, he’s surprisingly composed. He hears all the reasons he has never known and probably would have never wanted to know.
“Six months before my twentieth birthday, I was diagnosed with Adrenoleukodystrophy, better known as X-ALD. It’s an illness in the brain that’s incurable. When I first heard of it, my world came tumbling down - my life was just about to get started, I could almost almost meet my soul mate, I just had to wait for a little six months. Don’t you think everyone is in love with just the simple thought of loving someone? At that time, I was, too.
Doesn’t everyone want someone who completely understands them? Someone who will reassuringly stroke their hair, someone who will lull your worries away, someone who is as steady as a rock when you need it but also someone who will make you laugh, who’ll make your heart flutter until you’re afraid that it might thump out of your chest.
I was living in that hallucination. I wanted to fall in love like everyone I knew.
You can’t imagine how awful I felt when not only that dream was crushed but every other dream that had ever passed my mind too. Maybe I could love someone before I died - but we’d never grow old together and never would I turn gray or wrinkly nor could I see that happening to my soul mate either. I would never be able to get settled, to get a well-paid job, to create a family. The amount of sunrises I could still see were limited, the worth of every single second had suddenly increased by millions.
I honestly couldn’t think at that moment. So many thoughts came rushing through my mind, one even more selfish than the other one. I honestly only had egoistic thoughts at the moment - but isn’t that only human when you’ve just heard you’re incurably ill?
It was only later that I decided not to contact you at all. I was overthinking so much - wasting my precious time thinking about little things. But I was sure about this. Contrarily to all the selfish thoughts I had had, I thought it would be better not to contact you at all. To be selfless for a change. How selfish would it be for me to meet you, to love you, to make you love me, when we only had just a few months left? You would be the one left crushed, devastated - it wouldn’t be me hurting the most but it would be you. You would have to continue living after knowing me for just a few months. I’d be part of just a fraction of your lifetime but the impact of my presence would be enough to leave you reeling in pain at the simple thought of my name - or maybe you’d even forget me completely.
I would live with no regrets if I would have decided to meet you. But instead, you’d be the one to end up with all the sorrow and pain.
I’m sorry, I just couldn’t do it,” Yixing says, reaching out his hand to gently touch Wufan’s trembling one. There’s a sad look in his eyes, “I never wanted this to happen. It was all because I wanted the best for you. The doctor told me I could live for two more years before my vision and hearing would start to decline, three if I were to be lucky. One thing was sure - I’d be in a vegetative state within four years.
Up till now, the treatment is going well. Technology is getting better and better… but I still couldn’t meet you, not when I knew that chances of recovery were slim to zero. I moved here because they are experimenting with a new treatment here close in the neighbourhood. I never expected to meet my soul mate here… I’m so sorry for putting you through this - I only wanted to spare you the pain.”
And then, after a long silence, Yixing takes a deep breath and continues, “Walk away now. Cut all ties with me. Do it if you want. I’m not going to take this choice away from you once again - not now you know. I can disappear from your life if you want, spare you the pain, and when you’ll hear that I’ve died, it won’t be as if someone punched a hole through your heart but instead it’ll be as if someone just hit you lightly on the arm. It would be the appropriate amount of pain for someone you’d hardly know. The pain won’t be that gut-wrenching and you’d be able to cope with it.
I won’t be angry - be selfish, don’t think of me and spare yourself the pain.”
Wufan stares at Yixing, his brown eyes giving nothing away but determination. “You judged the situation wrongly. You weren’t acting selflessly… but with you taking away all of my options, with you recklessly deciding for me - that was being selfish. You made me wait for you every day since I’d turned twenty; every day started out with a hopeful flicker, every day I was thinking maybe today will be the day, maybe maybe maybe only to be disappointed when the sun set. Your decision could not have been more selfish.
So I’ll be greedy too. Let’s do this. I don’t care about the pain that might come later, I’m no masochist but all I want is to experience the feeling of true love, how short that experience might even be. Let’s do this. Let’s live life from day to day - there’s no tomorrow, just today.”
The small smile Yixing tries to suppress doesn’t escape from Wufan’s attention. “Okay, let’s do this.”
Their first date is a simple one, just at the coffee shop nearby their house where they warm their cold hands holding the mugs with hot chocolate. It’s where Wufan usually spends his time during work time listening to the rhythmic sounds of rain ticking against the windows and staring at the dark clouds with rays of sunshine peeking through. This time, he ignores all that and finds himself absorbed into the melodic sounds of Yixing’s voice and the way Yixing’s eyes crinkle when he laughs, the deep dimple that appears when he smiles, the way he grimaces, the way he looks for the right words to express his thoughts.
(And for Wufan, there are no words to express this turmoil of feelings inside his body. There was no word he knew that could describe this feeling of wholeheartedly loving someone, of the butterflies fluttering around in his stomach, of this feeling that kept tugging on the corners of his lips. He wished the Chinese language had as much words for ‘love’ as the Eskimos had for ‘snow’.)
They kiss on their second date. Amidst flushed cheeks, cold noses, it’s soft lips pressed against cold ones, warm tongue brushing past the other, and teeth awkwardly clashing against one other. It’s an explosion of heart beats and butterflies and Wufan’s lips are already stretching into a smile, as he pulls Yixing closer to his own body, hoping this moment would never end.
(Unfortunately, it does, like all things in life.)
On their third date, Yixing shows him his sketches. Wufan’s jaw drops when he sees the thin pencil strokes forming messily drawn faces. Only the eyes, the eyes were drawn in details, the way the light fell onto the pupil, the way they shone and sparkled, the way the irises were composed of small black lines and fading colours.
“Oh wow,” Wufan says, almost forgetting how to breathe, “You really have a lot of talent. This is beautiful.”
“Thanks,” Yixing smiles, a faint blush colouring his cheeks. “I… You’ve been the only thing on my mind lately… I-I tried to draw you but nothing, nothing, that comes from my hands is able to capture the perfection that you are to me.”
But when he shows Wufan the drawings - no sketches this time - he can’t believe his eyes. “What are you talking about?” he says, eyes taking in the unbelievable talent Yixing has. It was almost as if the drawing came to life, as if he was really looking at himself in a mirror. Only, that wasn’t him, just someone that looked like him but was far more perfect. Eyes soulful yet gentle, carrying so much depth that Wufan finds himself curious for its secrets, hair unkempt, messy, skin smoother than he has ever believed his own was. “This is… perfect. More than I’ll ever be.”
“Stop lying,” Yixing says before he presses his lips onto Wufan’s. “You’re far more perfect than this to me.”
(Later that night, Wufan does an attempt at drawing Yixing too but instead, he ends up drawing something that looks more like a rhinoceros and an uneven-eyed Chinese person mashed up together. He crumbles the paper in frustration but Yixing laughs and flattens the paper with his hand, telling him that he likes it and wants to keep it.)
“Why are you living here alone when there’s a possibility of you collapsing every moment? Why is there nobody living with you?” Wufan asks, arm around Yixing’s shoulder to press their bodies closer. They’re back at the coffee shop, sitting close on the couch in front of the fireplace. They’re watching the little flames in the fireplace come to life and retreat to the wood, relive and retreat. “Aren’t you scared something might happen?”
“My parents couldn’t come along; you see, their job is very important to them. They shed blood, sweat and tears to get to the position they are in now and it’d be impossible for them to give it up to move with me - and I totally understand them. Don’t they have to continue their life when I am gone? They sent me here in the hope for recovery. The hospital put a miniscule high tech device into my body and with that, they can see the effects of the cure, can see if it’s working and at the same time, they can also immediately take any action when they see it’s going the wrong way. They could be at my place within minutes if they’d wanted,” Yixing rubs his eyes sleepily and then sighs before he straightens his back, freeing himself from Wufan’s arm resting on his shoulders.
“The doctors estimate that I’ll live only for six more months. The cure is not working. My hearing is already deteriorating, slowly now but it’ll go faster and faster soon. Soon, my vision will follow and it won’t take long for me to turn into someone that’s only kept alive by machines. I’m…” Wufan sees the hand of Yixing slowly inching closer until the finger tips touch his cheek gently, his eyes filled by a look of sorrow, “…sorry.”
And Wufan swallows his tears away, keeping this façade of strength alive when in reality he is just a person crumbling to pieces.
“No, don’t be. Fight. There’s still hope. You won’t need your hearing nor your vision to feel this,” he leans in, slowly pressing his lips onto Yixing’s as he tries to ignore the burning hot tears in his own eyes, “nor do you need it to know that I’ll be there for you, that I love you.”
And Yixing smiles, still a sorrowful look in his eyes.
“Today. We promised to live day by day,” Wufan says.
(But he can’t help but be afraid of tomorrow. Because every passing day meant one day less to spend with Yixing.)
Wufan moves in with Yixing after a month since going out with each other. “I can’t sleep at night because I’m worried sick. What will happen if something happens to you and nobody’s there?” he says, a bag with his toothbrush, skin care products and other necessary things in his hand, barging his way into the apartment and ignoring the perplexed expression on Yixing’s face. “It’s not a big thing, if I need something, I can just go downstairs and get it.”
Later that night, Yixing laughs, saying that it’s just as if they’re on a school trip; as if they were roommates or maybe friends sneaking into each other’s rooms, exhilarated with adrenaline.
(That smile soon disappears when he discovers how long it takes for Wufan to take care of his skin.)
It’s only after two months of knowing Yixing that Wufan really experiences what it is like to live with someone that suffers from X-ALD. More and more often, the sentences that Yixing tries to pronounce stop making any sense anymore, sounds entangled with intentions. More and more often does Yixing put his glasses on, trying to hide the real cause behind this from Wufan but Wufan isn’t stupid. He can’t suppress the unimaginable surge of sadness when he realizes that the frequency of Yixing asking him if he has seen his glasses somewhere around because he lost them again becomes less and less too - but only because these glasses are always resting on Yixing’s nose now.
The day after, Yixing wakes him up around seven to watch the sunrise with him. It’s exceptionally cold for the season and they’re sitting on the balcony of Yixing’s apartment, trembling bodies close to each other as their breaths leave tiny clouds in the air. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Yixing asks, eyes sad as he watches the colours blend into each other, blue to purple to red to blue again, evading Wufan’s questioning look, “The way we still hope. Every day I wake up and I feel another spark of hope in my body, thanking God for giving me another day to live. They say that after darkness there will be light just like after the night there will be day. They say we have to thank the darkness because without it, what meaning would light have? We wouldn’t be able to realize what light is because there’d be nothing to compare it with. They taught us to hope.”
And yet, there ís no hope.
They’re both thinking the same thing. Wufan wants to ban the words out of his head, deny them and pretend that they’re all lies, so instead he goes in for a kiss, hard and rough and needy because he needs Yixing like he needs oxygen.
(When he refuses to break loose from the kiss even though black dots are starting to fill his vision, he realizes that maybe, he needed Yixing even more than oxygen.)
“Doctor told me they’d intensify treatment,” Yixing tells him two weeks later. It’s incredibly how badly his condition had gotten in just fourteen days - never before had Wufan thought that such a small amount of time could have such a big impact. “It now get worse, really bad - he told me. Only faster and faster. They’ll try to slow down.”
Closing his eyes, taking a deep breath in and slowly breathing out, Wufan tries to regain his composure. Everything, everything, was coming awfully close now. “Don’t…” he whispers, pulling Yixing close to him. “Don’t talk. I… Let’s just… just…”
Just what? Wufan doesn’t even know himself. All he knows is that he doesn’t want to think about it, that he just wants to live in the here and now forever and ever, that he just wants them to stay the same forever and ever. He wants to capture this moment, the exploding love and Yixing, Yixing, Yixing above all of them.
(That night, he has Yixing all to himself, bodies pressed close to each other, slow and gentle movements and an explosion of love and pleasure. In that small moment it doesn’t matter that they can’t communicate through language because the language of love is a universal one and Wufan forgets, just lives in the here and now. It just doesn’t last forever and ever.)
Wufan softly touches Yixing’s forehead, brushing the hair out of his eyes. In the past two weeks Yixing’s speech has gotten so bad that Wufan was basically able to see his brain looking for words that don’t exist anymore in his vocabulary. It’s like the words are disappearing through quicksand, like some virus has infiltrated his brain and deleting everything in the language department. And somehow, that’s quite true as well.
“Don’t feel sad,” Wufan tells him, smiling encouragingly though he knows the soft edges of sadness in his eyes betray him. “Didn’t I tell you earlier? It doesn’t mean anything if you are slowly forgetting. As long as you remember that you’re not alone, that you always have me to rely on, as long as you remember that, it’s fine… Language is not the only way on the world to communicate with each other.
I can see your aura; yellow for joy, pink for love. Communication can happen through so many ways.”
Kissing Yixing, he repeats the words I love you, I love you, I love you over and over in his head.
Wufan’s heart skips a beat when he gets home after work, house empty and cold. In his mind, he runs over and over the possibilities; maybe an appointment with the hospital? No, not that he knew of. Maybe an appointment with a friend? No, Yixing would have told him. Impatiently, he waits for another hour filled with repeated calls to Yixing’s number, heart beating faster than the beep on the other line, before he finally gives up on trying to contact him and calls to the hospital.
However, his heart promptly comes to a stop when he hears the earnest voice on the other line, “Zhang Yixing? I’m sorry, sir, but maybe it’d be better to tell you this in person.”
Doctor Kim was quite handsome and friendly, his blue aura showing balance and support in an uncertain world like this. The look of sympathy in his eyes was awful. “Mr. Zhang just had an epileptic seizure. We were at his apartment within two minutes but we still couldn’t prevent mr. Zhang from losing his ability to speak. His vision and hearing have been greatly damaged by the fit as well but maybe it’d be better if you’d see the damage for yourself.”
But there’s something about that moment, about the white door and the name plate with Zhang Yixing scribbled on it and the uncertainty that was lingering around the corner that made Wufan cringe at just the thought of stepping inside. So instead, he asks, his eyes still fixed on the name plate, “How… how long?”
A silence follows, a silence that’s given to him because he knows doctor Kim is inaudibly asking him ‘are you sure you want to know now?’ but he doesn’t retreat. He’d hear it sooner or later so what difference would it make now? Doctor Kim takes a deep breath before saying, “If we were to keep him alive artificially, six months at its most. But in all honesty, he has one more month left before he loses his hearing and vision as well. I’m really sorry we couldn’t do more.”
One more month.
One month.
One month.
“I’m-I’m sorry, could you leave me alone for a moment?” Wufan says, voice trembling. He suddenly feels so small, feels like the world, great and humongous, is coming down on him, while he is small, so so small.
Instead of going to the one person he cares the most about in the whole world, he gets up after a few minutes and rushes out - air, air, he needed fresh air.
In the cold, he grabs his hair in frustration, cries until the tears freeze on his cheeks and screams until his throat tightens around his voice and it becomes nothing more than a shrill shrieking. He felt so wronged, so angry at the world. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. There should have been so much more time, they should have been healthy, should have grown old together, they should have lived, laughed, loved. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be at all.
Later, he walks into Yixing’s room. The apologetic smile that breaks through on Yixing’s face makes Wufan cringe inside but he doesn’t let it show on the outside and instead, he forces himself to smile back even though his red eyes and runny nose betray him. “It’s okay,” he says, cold hand reaching out to hold Yixing’s warm one, “It’s alright. Everything’s going to be okay.”
But when Yixing reaches out his other hand to gently cope Wufan’s cheek, a finger wiping away a tear that seemed to have escaped from his iron will, Wufan can’t pretend anymore. He’d thought that he had cried his heart out already but there seemed to be no limit to his tears. Instead, the pitch-black sadness inside him suffocates him, and the tears start to run over his cheeks, until he is the one that has to be comforted by Yixing. “I’m sorry,” he sobs, “I should be the one comforting you. I’m… I’m sorry.” Sorry that he couldn’t give him more strength, sorry that he couldn’t prevent this from happening, sorry that Yixing was hurting even more because Wufan had been so driven to start this relationship.
But Yixing leans forward, softly kissing his tears away and Wufan understands.
It’s okay.
And for a split second, with Yixing’s arms wrapped around him, giving him strength and comfort, he believes it.