ashes, ashes
ashes, ashes (we all fall down)
lay/luhan ; ~2395 words. au.
mamihlapinatapai - n. a look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something they both desire but which neither wants to begin.
caution: written in a short amount of time without much thought. oops.
/
Yixing sleeps in May.
It's so bright, he thinks, so terribly bright and terribly alive. Yixing's not particularly fond of the spring, you see, he's not fond of it at all. It's all very conceptual. Beauty, beauty, beauty. He supposes that it's supposed to be beautiful in a way, with greenery and blue skies and all that jazz, all that famous stuff, that kind of imagination. Personally, Yixing doesn't understand the pull of it. It's not really his style.
But what he thinks isn't important, it's really just the fact that May belongs to the sun and beach and grass, so it's not his place to argue. Or compete. Or whatever they think he's gonna do. Because he's not. Really, he's not. Don't you believe him?
His sweet spot in between is comfortable. And safe. Yixing thinks that if he could, he'd sleep here forever - it's so warm, so nice, no troubles, no imagination.
A slight, startling rumble ruptures him awake, and Yixing falls off his mossy tree and on to the forest floor. It's cool earth and dirt that scrapes his palms when he hoists himself up, feeling the incoming ebb of consciousness and irritation begin to belittle him. Eyebrows furrowing, Yixing dusts himself up and looks up at canopy trees and his previous spot, and scowls. Maybe he can find another way to climb back up -
"Yixing?" a voice wobbles, and Yixing turns. His eyes catch sight of another half, drinking in the sight of sharp cheekbones and sun-kissed hair, distilled blue lips.
His voice takes a while, rough from months of no use, and quietly he responds, "Luhan?"
/
It's not like Yixing expects people, not really. It's more like he calls them to him. People are rather insignificant to him, in his eyes. They breathe and they die, and Yixing finds that fascinating. They've got great minds, surely, working miles at a minute, measuring air, but Yixing just likes to stare at their flushed cheeks, the steady rise and fall of their chest, breathing - breathing - breathing.
He wonders how it would feel like to breathe.
And then, he supposes, how would it feel like to suffocate while breathing?
Sitting in his ornate throne in a marble palace isn't all that it's cracked up to be. Yixing often finds himself falling back into slumber, just a darling newborn, barely able to understand what's going on around him - what he's capable of of. The stars, little starlites, they're called, wake him up, luminous white eyes peering at him in wonder.
Yixing remembers falling off his chair onto the transparent floor, heart catching into his throat as he thinks he's going to fall through the floor and dissipate into the oxygen-less vacuum of space, but his hands hold against nothing and he's propelled up against the sky. In fact, he's above the sky, above the earth even, maybe, hands glowing faintly blue.
Where are you going, luna? The voices are small and childish, like a band of kids coming near him and pulling at his clothes as if they want to gain his attention. Little sprites, the same starlites that wake him, float in front of him, their faces covered by a sheen of luminosity so that Yixing can't see them. Don't you wish to sleep?
"You're the one that woke me up," Yixing grumbles, and the starlites giggle. They're a collective body instead of one single sprite at a time, Yixing figures.
You need to sleep, luna, but you were falling, the starlites inform him. We keep you from falling.
"Falling?"
Yixing is the connoisseur of night, a shadow passing by the light of day, a simple whisper ghosting along the surface of the earth. When he is awake, everyone else sleeps, content in their slumber. Underneath him is the vast entity of space, but in front of him is a glass wall of fog, energy streaking across it's surface. And suddenly, he wishes to see what's on the other side.
Yes, luna, falling, the starlites murmur. For if you fall, so does sol, and we're all ashes if we fall down.
/
Sol.
Yixing hears the barest whisper about him, about this other half of his. He thinks about all the times he's slept, all the times that he's woken, breathed, and lived. Thinks about his sleepy little town in China, spending the days lax in his home, unworried, undeterred, unabbreviated. Somehow, that sleepy child that lay in still grasses and beneath cornflower blue skies breathed the life of the moon, a spirit of eternal rest and rise.
He sort of misses it, he does, that sleepy little town. One day, he had gone to bed, the shadows climbing over the rims of his vision, and the next he found himself slumbering across into the next heaven, a profound dream, startlingly white and black in it's entirety.
There's not much to do here, he supposes. At least in his town, he could go into the main square and talk to the people when he felt like it, or eat his mother's supper, or whisper comforting songs against his family's warm nights. There were things to do, people to see, lives to live. Yixing feels paused here, exalted in a way that he doesn't wish to be, stopped infernally in time. It annoys him in a way he didn't know he could be annoyed.
Moon spirit, they whisper. Luna, luna, save us, save us. Wake me from my dream.
Yixing yawns.
There are many planets, he learns, and he is not just the spirit of the Earth's moon - that of whom they still believe him to be all science, no mythical being to be heard, but the lone celestial body wandering, rotating, among other gas giants and rock structures. Those of whom still worship him, attempt to put stars in their eyes to become closer - just a little closer - if only for a moment.
There's one that sticks out from the rest. A place, a little thing just about bigger than Pluto, somewhere off into another solar system. His eyes are often turned toward Earth, toward the strip of land that continues to become corrupted with every passing breath, his home. So he doesn't realize to look around him, so immersed in his sorrow, to see the jutting crystals as high as mountains into the atmosphere. They don't know what it's called, but it's where Sol is from.
The exoplanet, they call it. The creation of everything unwanted.
Sol does not have the same ties, luna, the starlites whisper. They sound almost worried. Luna, please, let them go.
Yixing knows their sayings by heart. If he doesn't let go, they all fall down.
/
Yixing learns that Sol always visits him when he's asleep.
Unknowing of his real name - his human name, his mortal name - Yixing continues to call him Sol. To him, this person is intertwined to this lifetime in eternity just like he is, but Yixing can't see him as one of their own. A flesh and blood person just like him, once upon a time, once long ago. To Yixing, Sol is a bundle of sun energy and the tiniest, tiniest warm whisper in the middle of his drowning slumber.
So he stays up, that one day. His nights are becoming shorter and shorter, his days becoming longer and longer, fluctuating every now and them. Yixing hears those whispers now, clearer and clearer, becoming louder and louder, until one day he doesn't sleep at all.
The starlites, they're over the moon in their tizzy. Drunk, they are, in happiness and somber worry, mixed together in a dizzying concoction. Yixing wonders if they're really as old as they claim, those little bundles of light turning into the brightest stars.
Sol is a handsome man, perhaps no older than he was before. He doesn't look like anything or anyone Yixing has ever seen before - his eyes and nose and mouth, they're all rather humanoid, but Yixing has to remind himself that this is a creature from another planet - unearthly, great, unworthy of his eyes. Luna, luna, the starlites pull him back with their urgent whispers. He snaps out of his daze first, and then he notices that Sol - Sol had been there the same way, just beyond the glass wall, stepping right before the line the couldn't cross.
Yixing steps forward, his hands moving of their own accord, like he's possessed, like he's someone else using this body for another purpose. Yixing files away to a corner of his mind, and luna - luna? Takes over.
"I haven't seen you in so long," Sol whispers, hair like fallen sunshine, eyes as bright as ember. Everything about him is familiar, even though Yixing has probably never seen him in his life. "You've changed." His voice is neither deep nor light, but more like a sweet whisper. "Gotten older."
"We all get older," Yixing says in return, breathing lightly. It's been so long since he's spoken. So long. "Become degraded. Live again."
Sol laughs, and it sounds amazing. Something in Yixing folds and calms. It feels like a pressure inside of him has just been released.
Sol blinks, eyes widening, and suddenly when he talks his voice is different - changed, toneful, the notes of a melody. "You're luna," Sol says in awe, and Yixing can tell - this person is different. And suddenly it makes great sense to him.
He and luna, they're two in one body. His body.
"You're sol," Yixing says in reply. He kneels down, fingers pressed against the thin film that separates them. "I can see you."
"It's the time before the solstice," Sol whispers, except he's not Sol anymore, and now that it's clear to Yixing he feels disturbed calling this man by the name of an ancient spirit. "The line between us thins, then. Soon, this too, will be gone."
The thought makes his throat dry.
"My name is Luhan," Luhan pipes up, a smile tugging on the corner of his mouth.
Yixing gives him a smile in return, the first he's had in ages, warmth blooming in the very deepest caverns of his chest. "Yixing. It's a pleasure."
/
Luhan is right. Yixing learns that Luhan is usually right.
The space between them becomes small, almost nonexistent. Yixing has this urge to touch the surface of Luhan's skin, to feel his smile - just once, just once. He forgets about the starlites and the moon, forgets about the space and sky, and spends days staring into the luminous eyes of Luhan's, molten amber encased in a ring of gold.
Moments he sways in and out of dizziness, many times just dropping to the ground completely. After a while he learns that this is his body moving back into it's natural cycle, because for the moments when he sleeps, Luhan is awake and pining, and when Luhan is asleep, Yixing is left in his ashes. They never leave a moment's notice without each other, though. Always within. Yixing can feel Luhan's breath sweet on his cheek, and every moment falls more and more in love.
The day of the solstice, neither him nor Luhan stay asleep; they're awake, far too awake, buzzed on the blood of the purely metaphysical, channeling a sort of love that neither wishes to begin.
Luhan's hand on his shoulder is electricity - pure, burning fire, and Yixing chokes on air as the other pulls away, cringing, horrified.
Even so, Yixing bears the pain and presses his lips against the side of Luhan's, just the barest touch, just the faintest hint of cold.
/
When Yixing wakes up again, Luhan is not at his side, but instead the glass wall of fog is between them again, like a simmering shade, a constant reminder. Immediately, he goes toward it, knowing that it's keeping him back, knowing that it's keeping them apart.
Starlites pull at his arms and feet, pull as his soul, begging, begging. Please, luna, don't. If you fall, we all fall with you. If you fall, we all fall with you.
Yixing begs and begs until his eyes fall out of their own accord, and he breathes once more in silent but familiar regret, wishing to have never begun, wishing to have never touched, never warmed -
If you fall, we all fall with you.
/
They said that the moon sets every night for the sun to shine. They said that the moon dies for the sun to live. Yixing sleeps so Luhan can stay awake.
/
The next time Yixing wakes up, he stays up. He's not the moon anymore, but Luhan is still his sun.
/
Barely any time has passed in Changsha. His parents said that he had almost drowned in the river that was nearby their home, which is pretty weird, considering he doesn't go near the river at all. Has been stuck in a coma ever since then. He sleeps a lot too. They leave him alone. Sending parishing, sweetened thoughts his way, whispers of ease to deter his soul, but Yixing is searching, searching, always searching.
There's nothing in this life for him that he can hold on to, so Yixing dreams.
/
In his dreams, he's still sleeping, sleeping in a dream within a dream within a dream.
Luhan, with his distilled blue lips and sun-kissed hair stares at him from an arm's distance, eyes wide. Yixing can reach out and touch him, feel the same electricity, if he wanted to. But he can't. He wants Luhan to start their downfall, but he can't. Neither of them can. Not when they know the consequences.
"Yixing?" Luhan whispers, wrangling his fingers together, voice yearning.
"Luhan," Yixing says, and no matter how hard he tries, no matter how much he wants heed the glass wall between them, sleep for the sun to wake, die for the sun to live, Yixing can't do it.
His palm touches Luhan's shoulder, electricity sparking, and he can hear the familiar chants of an old children's rhyme, the vaguest sounds left from a broken chime of Starlites.
Don't fall down, luna. If you fall, we all fall down with you.