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Everywhere Hao looks, there is an empire.
It bleeds into his shop in the evenings, when the sun is low and dull in the sky and the typical meager but diligent population of townspeople walking and living on the streets makes way for the iron-clad boots of too many unfamiliar men—soldiers, from so far out of town that the biting names of their hometowns spoken over sloshing beer and steamed vegetables are unrecognizable to Hao.
It moves in, into the rackety shack next door and the overpopulated inn down the street and the old abandoned barn at the end of the road that hasn’t seen an owner since the farmer who built it was caught unforgivingly in a fire a few years back. It’s a soldier that comes to conquer and rule and enforce; it should be fast, almost enough to be painless, but the people who live here are poor and desperate and so it is unsurprising and yet unfortunately demoralizing when the first bumbling vendor sells his daughter into the captivity of a man whose battalion is scheduled to move on to the next town in less than a fortnight. One by one, they take to wife young girls, and starving widows, and pretty unsuspecting boys, and they do not leave when they are expected to. Within a year, the streets are crawling with them. (There is a new wedding every week, and although Hao is required to attend each one, it never becomes easier to witness—but he is thankful that he has not yet been subjected to such a fate, and so he stays silent and complacent.)
Autumn was their season of marriage—the more colorful the leaves, the more harmonious the matrimony, people used to say. Now, it is cold and there is snow littering the ground and still people are being wed. The foliage around them is dry and brown—the Gods will not bless their partnership. (The soldiers do not care. Their young wives weep for the tragedy of it.)
It is an empire, on the tongues of every person in town—biting as they whisper of the tragedies of war to each other in the deep nights when the soldiers are too drunk to understand their dialect, bloodied and mauled when they are caught and forced to kneel in front of their friends and children as the same soldiers take a blade to the organ in their mouths, severing it in one easy cut.
Maybe it should be invigorating to watch the nation rise. Maybe this is what patriotism should encapsulate: joy, stabbing at his chest as he’s crushed by the unforgiving boot of the power of his country.
Hao tries to understand it. He tries to cheer for it, to welcome it: they are conquerors. It is what the soldiers tell them often, but as much as Hao nods and placates and smoothly deflects the attention, he only finds irony in the words. It is as if these men don’t know that they are talking to the ones who are being conquered.
People say the emperor killed a God, to be this prosperous. They say he tore a spirit from the sky and gutted it mercilessly, swallowing up all of the fortune and blessing and power it carried within its bosom to keep for himself. It is blasphemous, and for that, it excites people. Maybe they will be led to victory—maybe they will prosper, too.
Hao feels only fear.
There is death on the streets, pooling and seeping and splashing under Hao’s boots as he trudges down the hill and towards the secluded woods that encroach on every side of the town. There’s a young girl, so skinny her cheekbones are protruding unnaturally out of her face. Her bones seem to crack and grind as she falls to her knees in front of Hao, tears streaming down her pink cheeks as she begs breathlessly for the loose change in Hao’s pockets. (He sidesteps her and continues on his journey; there are no coins in his pockets at all. He is just as poor as she is.)
People used to keep pets, before famine found its permanent home among them. Now, the same dogs and goats that used to lie happily on people’s porches, bellies full and thoroughly rubbed, are decorating the town in mangled, dead heaps. The smell of it is putrid; Hao plugs his nose as he passes a particularly rotten animal corpse, spilling with maggots, but still he continues.
He is intimately familiar with the disease that has overtaken all of them, in a way that would drive most people to madness. He will never claim to be something he is not, and he is not a doctor—still, he knows what he is, and that is someone who will do what is needed if no one else is able. He is not a doctor, never has been, but as the years have gone by his shop has begun regardless to be stocked with less of the fresh vegetables he grows in his garden and more of the bitter, biting tonics and medicines his mother taught him to make from the herbs in their backyard when he was a child. There is no one else to do it, never has been, and so Hao is the one who opens his door for death to enter.
They bring him the frozen, frigid bodies that are plagued with frostbite after a too-long day of working tirelessly in the snow. It’s his table they lay the men across who have been beaten and bruised by the whips and knives of one too many angry, drunk soldiers. When a young child falls ill in the earliest hours of the morning, poisoned with fever and nausea, rapping knuckles on Hao’s door will pull him mercilessly from his bed and lead him to their home to feed them bitter remedies from his own spoon, his hands pressed against their forehead to cool them with his own natural body temperature.
The walk to the wooded perimeter of the town isn’t a particularly long one, but Hao’s bag is heavy on his tired shoulders and he is sweating and out of breath by the time his feet step off the road and onto the muddy foliage of the forest floor. Hopefully he won’t be here for long—it’s already getting dark, horizon swallowing up the sun behind its looming vastness. He only has a few natural herbs he needs restocked that he knows grow around the area, ones he doesn’t already have planted in his garden, so if all goes well he should be home before the darkness of night brings any real danger.
He treks up the hill diligently, breathing heavy through his nose as he slips between the trees and deeper into the embrace of the woods. The melodic chirping of birds echoes around him, a squirrel or two rustling around in the branches above. Luckily, the worst of the recent heat spell is over, and so it is merely warm but not overbearingly hot as he makes his way through the thick foliage. His feet carry him quietly to an area he is familiar with, a clearing in the brush about a twenty minute walk by foot from the edge of the forest that he visits often. The ground here is littered with mushrooms and small flowers, barely the size of the nail on his pinky finger—they are a natural anti-inflammatory, and Hao drops to his knees and begins silently picking them from the damp earth, careful to keep the roots intact as he drops them into the satchel hanging off his shoulder. There is something beautiful, he thinks, in repurposing the growing, thriving aliveness of Earth he finds in the hills around him and using it to bleed life back into their town. As they will become dirt and ground and Earth once they die, he thinks it is quite fitting that it is the Earth that keeps them from death, too, as if she is not impatient to meet them with open arms once their time comes.
He hums as he works, the golden glow from the setting sun eventually fading into a dark shadowy grey, blanketing everything around him with the promise of night as his fingers sift through the soil beneath his calloused knees. A spider the size of the head of a pin crawls excitedly up the exposed skin of his arm, and he mindlessly swats it away, dirt packing beneath his nails as he works. The young son of the butcher has fallen ill, and Hao will need a large portion of these herbs to help ease the pain of that one child alone. He hopes he will have some left over afterwards to fill the empty jars in his cabinets at home, when he is finished doing his duty.
Suddenly, so loud and sharp that it causes Hao to drop his bag in surprise, its contents spilling messily across the dirt floor below, a splintering cry echoes through the air around him. His head snaps up, eyes widening and searching immediately for any danger; that was not the sound of an animal, he’s sure of it. That was a person—a man.
His hands work to shakily brush the dirt off of his lap that’s fallen there from the roots he’s been picking as his eyes scan the trees around him—his first thought is that there’s a jaguar, that someone has been attacked and he needs to run before he’s the next one to be hunted. (Although—as much as he’s worked outdoors since he was a child, this is a skill he has never gained; he has never been fast. His hands shake as he dully accepts that he would not make it back to town fast enough to save himself.) His search yields no results, though, and soon enough he’s standing, draping his bag haphazardly back over his shoulder and taking a few hesitant steps forward as another desperate cry rings through the forest.
“Hello?” he calls hesitantly, hardly loud enough to reach anyone but himself regardless. His throat suddenly feels dry and impossibly parched. (He’s afraid.)
“Help,” comes a call from the same voice, this time shakier. Weaker. In the back of his mind, Hao concludes that if it’s not a jaguar then it must be a soldier, an even more vicious killer. Someone from town who got on a soldier’s wrong side, who was dragged out here to be punished away from prying eyes, maybe. But even though the soldier could still be near, even though Hao could easily be next, he shuffles slowly in the direction of the voice. He is not a doctor, but if his hands have the ability to save then he almost unfortunately feels they must.
He makes his way (with shaking hands, dutifully as the doctor that he is not) through the overgrown foliage, careful eyes scanning the forest around him for anyone or anything that could be lurking nearby, stalking. He bites down harshly on his bottom lip as another cry rings through the air around him—if there really is a soldier near, he wonders almost dully, then he is as good as dead. The jaguar would’ve given him more mercy.
Although he is inching forward slowly enough to be silent (very slowly, masking terror behind seeming mindfulness), his feet eventually carry him to the base of an ugly knotted tree, its vast branches twisting up towards the sky in a wicked pattern. It is here that he finds the creature whose screams have been filling the forest with their grating sound—and it makes no sense, Hao knows it doesn’t, because the screams had belonged to a man, but it is not a man that waits for him here: there is, gnashing its teeth and pouring blood from a gaping gash right down its middle, the largest snake Hao has ever seen tangled in the branches of the tree. It is not a man, but its mouth is pointed to the sky and spilling from its scaly lips is the most man-like cry, and it doesn’t make any sense, it doesn’t make any sense —but intestines are spilling from the animal’s body faster than it can flex its desperate muscles to keep them in, and the bottoms of Hao’s shoes are growing slippery from the amount of blood pooling beneath them, and so against the better part of himself Hao swallows his nausea and confusion and inches closer, watching the snake writhe in agony. (Hadn’t he heard someone speak, call out for help in his own tongue? he dully wonders, but the thought is quickly swallowed by the need to catch this animal’s liver with dirty shaking fingers before it slips from its body.)
The snake screams and shakes and flicks its body around desperately, chillingly human pleas for mercy filling the stagnant air around them as Hao breathes deeply through his own fear and works the animal’s organs back inside its contracting body. He has never operated on such a creature before, but what he finds beneath fingers more nimble than should be possible in such a situation is similar enough to what hides underneath the skin of a human, and so with effort and time he is able to reconstruct the puzzle of the snake’s insides. His fingers are stained with dirt and blood and he is distantly aware that this is all likely for naught—the animal will die of infection soon enough, after having the stain of Hao’s unclean hands within its body. Still, it would be unlike him to watch it turn itself inside out until it dies an excruciating and pathetic death alone in the forest. It has never been his right to decide if the time of death has come for any living being if he has the power to prevent it, even for a short while—he is not a God.
The sun finishes its descent below the horizon, painting the world black, and Hao works life back into the body of the dying snake.
It is late into the night when he secures the last strip of fabric torn from his own clothing around the animal’s torso, tying it in a bow far too pretty for its purpose—but it does its job, and the snake’s organs stay fastened within its body, open wound cradled by the skin of Hao’s back, the sweaty, stained pieces of his shirt. The snake has been quiet for the better part of an hour, its cries having melted into whimpers and groans before eventually settling into the eerie silence that blankets them now. To Hao’s incredible relief, the animal that created such a wound (a jaguar after all, most likely) never found its way back to them. It is just Hao, and the shivering snake decorated with a blood-stained bow, and the quiet of the night.
Hao’s hands begin to properly shake when he realizes how late it has become, how the woods around him shift quickly into something unpredictable and deadly under the watch of the moon (and worse—the possibility of finding himself in the path of a drunk soldier on his way home who has nothing but a simmering rage at what he has become and the cover of darkness to utilize that rage in whatever way he pleases).
“Um,” Hao says dumbly, blinking slowly as he wipes his hands on the fabric of his trousers. The crickets chirp beneath his feet as he shifts his weight from one leg to the other, unsure of whether to help the snake to the ground and risk being bitten, or to leave it strung up in the tree like some gruesome butcher’s corpse left to dry in the back of his shop. He tilts his head to the side, contemplating. “Would you like to be let down?” he asks hesitantly; his voice wavers as he speaks, barely loud enough to reach even his own ears.
The snake does not respond. Hao swallows thickly and pretends that is what he expected.
It’s not until he closes the front door of his home behind him, grating sound of the lock sliding into place filling the silence of the dusty front entrance and making him shiver, that Hao realizes he hadn’t gone back to collect the herbs he’d dropped at the sound of the first scream. He sighs deeply, digging the palms of his hands into his eyes and rubbing roughly, almost punishingly as he makes his quiet way into the darkness of his home. His firm, handmade mattress greets his tired eyes as he shuffles into his bedroom (and his kitchen, and his pantry, and his workspace—the work he does never provides him with the kind of wealth he would need to own a house for himself that is more than two rooms wide), stuffed with old shirts and trousers and sewn up with uneven stitches of twine. He throws his body onto the thing, a long, drawn-out sigh breathing despair between the lazy gap of his lips.
He cannot sleep—he knows this, and yet he lets himself close his eyes if only for a moment or two. A child is dying, and he is the only one who knows how to prevent it, but he’s come up short this time—the heavy guilt pooling in Hao’s gut sloshes around sickeningly as he turns onto his side, eyelids burned with the image of blood and intestines and gleaming, scaly skin.
Hao is not a doctor, but if there is one thing that he is, undoubtedly, indefinitely: he is reliable. He is available. He is there.
He wonders how long it will be until the family of the sick child comes knocking on his door, tears staining their faces as they wonder why he, for the first time in perhaps his entire life, has failed them.
After an adequate amount of rest (it hasn’t been more than ten minutes, but there is something horrid clutching at Hao’s chest and he feels as if he might die himself if he doesn’t get up and at least do something) Hao pushes himself back to his feet and walks across the creaky floorboards to the rows of cupboards lining the wall of his kitchen. He rubs the fatigue out of his eyes with one hand and swings a cabinet door open with another—a cabinet that he knows, because he’d seen it be so before he left earlier this evening, because it is the reason he left at all, is empty.
The door creaks open beneath his hand, and the air is sucked from his lungs all at once as he takes in the sight he finds before him (suddenly he feels that he doesn’t actually know much at all, it seems, at least tonight). He feels as if he should scream, but something unidentifiable is clogging his throat, keeping him quiet. He wonders if he is going to cry—it feels like it, overwhelmingly so, but he hasn’t cried in years, and so he swallows the thing down and allows himself to reach forward with hesitant, trembling fingers.
The jars perched on the cabinet shelf are full, so much so that they’re overflowing, with so many herbs held within them that they’re spilling out of the cabinet and onto the floor below, decorating the rough wood and the tops of Hao’s feet. The apartment is filled with the minty, fresh smell of them, so overwhelmingly clean and bright that it's almost putrid.
Hao twirls a stalk between his fingers. He swallows down the tears, again. He points his face to the sky and thanks the Gods.
(The empire falls. The emperor has been speared clean through his throat, people whisper behind cupped palms; someone else has taken the throne, someone gentler, kinder, younger in years but not naive. War gives way to something quieter: not quite peacefulness, but close enough that it is comforting. As it goes, the state of the country with it slips back into something neutral, something graceless but not heavy enough to crush people beneath it.
One by one, over the years, the soldiers living in the town grow ill and are quickly swept away by and into death—no matter the tonics Hao forces past their lips, or the care he presses into their skin with his own hands, none of them survive. Their young, widowed wives celebrate in the streets.
Hao’s shop thrives. His garden blossoms beautifully beneath his careful hands, and people force their way into his store by the dozens to buy his produce—it is the best there is for miles. His pockets are lined with gold, so much that it weighs him down when he walks. His cupboards are always well stocked, his bed always warm. He forgets what it feels like to go hungry.
He calls it luck, but there is something—like a shadow, vaguely, and if Hao were drunk enough to admit it, he might say that sometimes it almost looks like a man. It stalks him, hovering over his shoulder as he works and seeping into his body when he sleeps. Some nights, when he is alone, it brushes gently against his skin, and there is no one there—but Hao can feel it, can feel someone’s warmth pressed against his own. Between shallow breaths and twitching legs, he lets the thing consume him, and oh, does it.
Something wary and worried pools higher and higher in his gut by the day, as he’s haunted by what he can distractingly call luck, something he worries will swallow him whole. Its shadowy, shapeless form carries him through the world—it stains everything around him beautiful, terrifyingly easy shades of prosperity, and he sends a devoted prayer of thanks to the Gods every night, whispered from desperate pursed lips, in hopes that the gratitude will save him from whatever is looming over him crashing down and crushing him into dust.
He has never been a lucky man; he has always been just a man. He wonders how long it will be before the pendulum swings back.)
It is autumn, in a way that paints the leaves and the sky shocking shades of orange and red. The forest is colorful and vibrant and alive, and the town with it—it is the season of marriage, once again. Older men sit together late into the night, filling the pubs and restaurants with their budding enthusiasm as they trade away their sons and daughters with firm, sweaty handshakes and poorly concealed grins behind brimming mugs of beer. Young couples fumble through clumsy proposals, too eager to claim their own blessings from the Gods with a matrimony held under the vivid dancing color of the trees.
Hao does not escape it all himself, this time. It’s a young baker, calloused and worn but still beautiful—he’s young, too, only a year or so older than Hao. (Hao had hardly been surprised when the man had slipped the ring onto Hao’s finger over the counter of his shop, after weeks of unnecessary visits and, afterwards, long, hesitant goodbyes—his eyes had been so full of hope as he’d stumbled through a nauseatingly sweet sonnet about Hao’s unprecedented beauty, and Hao had sighed and decided that maybe it was finally time to let himself be something like this: a little bit older, a lot less alone.)
His name is Jiwoong; they are to be married within the week.
Autumn is one of his busier seasons at the shop, when there is frost on the grass in the mornings and a chill on the breath of the sky in the evenings. Most people’s gardens have dwindled by this point, killed by the cold; Hao is not so unfortunate. Under Hao’s touch, his plants thrive indefinitely. It’s easy enough to distract himself from everything (marriage, from marriage) when there is so much to do, and so he does; the lucky shadow clings to his shirt as he rearranges jars of preserves and rinses off heads of lettuce and replaces the labels of old bottles of tonics.
He keeps himself as busy as possible (which is quite) as the days bloom into each other. Jiwoong stops by daily, bringing him kind words and steaming loaves of handmade bread—Hao accepts them with a thankful smile, swallowing down the nervous bile steadily rising in his throat.
“Thank you,” the man whispers delicately over their clasped hands on one of his visits, “for giving me a chance, Hao. I will take good care of you.” (“I love you,” he does not say. Hao can almost hear it spilling from his lips, anyway.)
Time seems to be the one thing very decidedly not on Hao’s side—he runs his shop, and curls up to sleep next to the shadowy thing he’s lived with for the past months, and cooks and cleans and cools a breakout of fever with his own chilly palms—and though everything is good, so much so that it settles uncomfortably in the pit of Hao’s stomach, time does not bend for his will in the way most things do, these days. Time speeds on: and Hao is not ready for it, but there are four days, and then three, and then he’s being rushed into the back room of the church and a dozen women he only knows in passing are rubbing oils and herbs against his skin as he adjusts the lacy veil hanging over his face with shaking fingers.
“Don’t be afraid,” one young woman—Yuqi, if Hao remembers correctly—says gently as she readjusts the red robes sweeping down the slope of his shoulders (he does not know whose clothes they are; he’s found himself surrounded today by a crowd of people thrilled to pay him back for all he’s done for their community by painting beauty across his cheekbones and dressing him in their best fabrics, if only for today).
“I’m not afraid,” Hao says, voice empty. He doesn’t expect to convince her, so he hardly tries, and his lips quirk upward when Yuqi rolls her eyes knowingly and slaps his arm.
“You’re trembling like a leaf,” she quips, fingers smoothing out the almost nonexistent wrinkles in his clothing. “It’s just Jiwoong. He’s always had his eyes on you, since we were children. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Hao doesn’t respond; he thinks he might puke if he opens his mouth.
The room is filled almost suffocatingly with the scent of jasmine; Hao closes his eyes as the tips of his fingers are dipped into bowls of lukewarm water, flowers floating gently along the surface. The women coo over him, brushing stray strands of hair off of his forehead and kissing his cheeks loudly, their lip oils staining his skin and making him glow pretty and pink.
“You look lovelier than me,” Yuqi murmurs, her hands no doubt one pair of the many arranging him just how they like. He keeps his eyes closed and hums noncommittally in response. She takes his silence as permission to continue (it is; he really doesn’t mind––if anything, it’s grounding). “It’s a little bit ridiculous how pretty you are, Hao, really. I’m surprised you weren’t snatched up to wife as soon as you turned fifteen.”
“It hasn’t been that long,” Hao reminds her helpfully.
She rolls her eyes (his are still closed, so he doesn’t actually know this for sure, but by the Gods he can feel it with how pointed it is). “Of course it hasn’t,” she whines playfully. “Don’t let any of us forget how mature and successful you have become at such a young age, darling. How humbling your presence is.”
Hao grumbles, reaching up blindly to slap her away (there are too many hands on him; who he actually hits escape him, and he’s sure it’s not actually Yuqi, but it’s his wedding day. They give him grace). “That’s not what I meant.”
“Of course not.” Her voice is lilted in a way that makes Hao almost want to lash out at her, gnash his teeth and show her that he isn’t the child she’s treating him as. It would be a lie, though, to claim she doesn’t have at least a few years on him, and so he sinks bonelessly further into his seat and lets her tease him.
It doesn’t take much longer for the gaggle of women surrounding him to deem him sufficiently pampered (‘pretty enough to meet the Gods’, they’d said) and it is without much grace that he is pulled to his feet and led out of the back doors of the church to the clearing of land behind it.
Weddings are never held indoors—the Gods must be able to witness the matrimony. Today, the sky is cloudy and grey, but the sun is vigorous in its attempts to break through, so it’s bright enough. The grass is decorated with scattered orange leaves, fallen from the foliage above. Among the crumpled things are people Hao knows and people he doesn’t—they all smile graciously as his gaze sweeps over them, sitting quietly among the dirt like little daisies. It isn’t spring, not even quite, but before Hao is a field of wildflowers, and his knees are suddenly growing weak and his eyes are being drawn now to the man standing under the natural archway of trees at the edge of the field and oh, Jiwoong is crying.
The amount of sunlight that does escape through the thick cloud coverage paints Jiwoong’s features bright and warm; his tears roll down his cheeks like liquid gold. He smiles, cheeks curled upward so fiercely that he almost looks pained, as if Hao has struck him with his mere presence. He reaches out, and even with ice and terror freezing the muscles in his legs, Hao knows if he stays still he will shatter—so he chews nervously on the inside of his cheek and carries himself to Jiwoong’s side.
“My husband,” Jiwoong murmurs once Hao is within earshot, the words devastatingly delicate in the way they wash over Hao like the early tide of the sea, with not quite enough force to drag him out, so he is kept floating close enough to shore in the expanse of the ocean to be safe from the dangers of it. Hao shivers and bows his head, eyes studying the dirt below them.
“Not yet,” he reminds, but it’s a weak thing. He doesn’t even know why he’s disputing, when they’re so close to being just that; a part of him seems to need the cheekiness, lest he fall into something as terrifying as honesty and devotion.
Regardless of it all, Hao’s hollow argument does nothing but widen the smile on Jiwoong’s face, pulling it taut, so heavy that his eyes crinkle from the weight of it. “Not yet,” he agrees instantaneously, as if every word out of Hao’s mouth is scripture to him, “but soon.”
Hao digs his nails into the skin of his palm. “Soon,” he echoes. For reasons he can’t quite understand, the word tastes like a lie on his tongue.
They begin the ceremony—Hao feels dizzy, and everything runs by him like a dream, one he is not quite fast enough to catch. Jiwoong ties a lacy piece of fabric around his wrist at one point, and then they’re drinking scalding tea, and Hao is sure the cup falls from his fingers and crashes to the floor below, but no one seems to notice. He blinks determinedly, trying to focus, but for as many weddings as he’s witnessed as a guest, this feels completely unrecognizable to him, and he continues to walk through it like a dead man.
Jiwoong must realize the haze Hao has found himself trapped in, because he smiles graciously at him and squeezes his hand; Hao hadn’t realized they were holding hands in the first place.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, not sure if his shaky voice is coming out loud enough to be heard, but Jiwoong nods in acknowledgement, so he continues. “I must be nervous. I can’t focus.”
Jiwoong’s eyes sparkle; his cheeks curl under the weight of his smile. “You’re doing wonderfully, darling. You look so beautiful.”
Hao clings to the words, hoping desperately that they'll ground him—they, nauseatingly, don’t. Time continues to spin around him like the biting wind, tugging him to and fro like a ragdoll. It’s interesting and confusing and mind numbing the way that things move so quickly and yet so ridiculously slowly, as it seems to have been ages, years, and they are still not married. Hao takes a deep breath, trapping his plush bottom lip between his teeth as his eyes study the muddy ground beneath their feet. He wonders how much longer it’ll take, how much longer until-
Someone screams.
Hao jolts in surprise, the shrillness of it ringing through the otherwise quiet, crisp autumn air. A chill runs down his spine as he and Jiwoong turn their heads in unison, towards the audience members who are almost all now standing from their spots in the grass (and clinging to and climbing up each other, to get away from the ground below, terror painted across their faces), and before Jiwoong’s hands have even fallen from where he is clutching the end of Hao’s veil, Hell swallows them in its flames.
It feels like a dream—and maybe it is, because Hao has perhaps never seen something as nightmarish as this. There are snakes: everywhere Hao looks, and everywhere he doesn’t, slithering and writhing and hissing, snakes. A glass tips over in the dirt where someone has dropped it, and serpents spill from it endlessly, the color of bloody red wine. A woman shrieks, and Hao wishes his eyes hadn’t followed the sound even as he’s unable to tear his gaze away; her hair is twisting and tangling around the snakes that are looping across her face and around her milky throat. Her eyes are frozen open in terror, mouth gaping in a now soundless scream as the creatures shove their way past her teeth.
Everything happens so fast. There are hundreds of them, maybe thousands, writhing through the grass like slugs; Hao watches in abject horror as they finally creep upon the two of them, as they wrap around Jiwoong’s ankles, as they yank harshly on him so that he falls to his knees.
“Wait, w-what’s-” Jiwoong tries to say, brows furrowed as the snakes twist up his body, but there’s a serpent around his throat, now, and it’s squeezing and Jiwoong’s skin is turning blue and there’s so much screaming and Hao can’t fucking move. He’s frozen, eyes wide and fingers twitching at his sides, as he watches the creatures bury their way underneath Jiwoong’s skin until he is writhing in the same way they are, his veins bulging and thrumming alongside the serpents wiggling below his flesh. His groans of agony fill the air, and Hao opens his mouth to say something, anything—he’s puking, before he gets the chance to speak, the bile of his stomach dripping down his chin and staining the front of his blood red robes. If Jiwoong were able, surely he’d comfort Hao in this moment: he, horrifyingly, doesn’t even see Hao paint himself with his own sickness. There are too many snakes, and they’re burying themselves behind Jiwoong’s eyes, so deep into his eye sockets that the things burst from his skull and roll dejectedly across the grass below them. Hao jumps backwards in terror as more vomit spills from his lips, bending in two this time to clutch at his stomach—the sight before him is enough to curdle his insides and shake him with violent illness.
He sobs as he retches, legs shaking so intensely he falls to the ground: and what a mistake that is, as he reaches out mindlessly for the comfort of Jiwoong’s arms, as he finds the strength to raise his head once more to look at the man now directly in front of him, as he feels Jiwoong’s head hit his lap with a thud.
The man falls, cold and dead, into his embrace.
There’s more screaming, and it takes a moment for Hao to realize it’s coming from him; he’s wailing, tears streaming down his face as he clutches Jiwoong in his arms and watches dozens of snakes crawl out of the bleeding gashes in his face and slither away into the grass. He’s vomiting again, then, into the mud next to them, chest shaking with the force of his sobs.
Suddenly, so abruptly that it’s chilling, the wind carries to them a haunting melody. Hao blinks slowly, sniffling through his tears as his head snaps up—every single person in the field falls immediately silent in the face of the music.
It’s the sound of a flute, Hao thinks dully, and somewhere in the back of his mind he wonders why he even cares, but suddenly the song is washing over him and he’s drowning in it and his mind is melting from the heat. The world, already blurred from the sheet of his tears, starts to spin, properly and dizzyingly.
He’s silent, crumpled into a heap on the floor, dead husband-to-be in his lap, unable to do anything but observe as his wedding guests silently pick themselves up off the floor, rearranging into polite rows in the grass.
And now that everyone is sitting, he sees him: a man, standing at the edge of the field, flute in hand.
He’s striding gracefully towards them, haunting melody swirling from his pressing fingers and pursed lips, dark and shadowed and so, so beautiful.
Hao can’t look away. He doesn’t know why, doesn’t understand it, but he can’t look away.
“Get up,” someone says, and it takes Hao a long moment to realize that it’s Yuqi, that her eyes are dull and empty and she’s tugging on his arm to help him stand. “Get up, Hao, silly boy. You are to be married.”
Hao gawks at her from his place on the muddy ground, pinned underneath the weight of Jiwoong’s dead corpse. His eyes well with more tears than before, and he brings a hand up to his face to chew on his nails—he stops abruptly before the digits meet his mouth, though, swallowing down bile when he sees the blood staining his fingers.
The world turns on its side as Yuqi drags him to his feet, dislodging Jiwoong’s body so that it hits the floor below them with a loud thud. Her hands run routinely through his hair and adjust his vomit-stained robes. “You look beautiful,” she says, her voice void of any emotion. She blinks slowly, stepping back. “Hanbin is lucky to have you. We’ve all been waiting ages to see you two marry, since you were children. Chin up, love. This is a good thing.”
Hao only cries harder. Everything is spinning so fast, he can’t focus, he doesn’t understand-
“Please,” he begs, choking on his tears. “Please, what are you talking about, who the fuck is Hanbin? J-Jiwoong, he’s dead, h-he—I couldn’t save him, please, I didn’t even t-try and he was right there in front of me and I should’ve-”
“Shhhh. Don’t speak, darling; he’s here.”
Yuqi steps back, the bones of Jiwoong’s arm cracking beneath her foot as she leans all of her weight back onto the body beneath her—she doesn’t look down, doesn’t even flinch, as she moves aside to make way for the man now looming behind her.
The stranger isn’t playing his flute anymore, but somehow there is still music echoing through the air, a melody so calm and comforting that it makes Hao’s gut twist with sickness. His hands, now empty, come immediately to rest on Hao’s cheeks, gently wiping the teartracks from his skin. His lips are curled into a kind smile, his ridiculously long eyelashes fluttering as he studies Hao’s face. Hao, in turn, does the same—he doesn’t have a choice, his body swaying and throbbing and molding to the tune of the music enveloping them. He blinks dumbly at the man before him, at this stranger cradling his face in his hands, and oh, he is so incredibly beautiful. He finds himself leaning into the caress of skin against his cheeks, his breathing beginning to even out as the man’s thumb rubs slowly back and forth against him.
“Hello again,” the man murmurs, eyes shining with wonder. “Oh how I’ve missed you, my beautiful love.”
Hao lets out an almost strangled whimper in response, body too numb and sedated to properly speak anymore. He’s begun to sway back and forth, he thinks, hands hanging limply at his sides as his gaze refuses to tear away from the beautiful, beautiful face of the man before him.
He removes one of his hands from Hao’s face, and then there’s a sharp tug on one of his arms and he (against his body’s desperate need to avoid doing just this) glances down to find the lacy fabric Jiwoong had offered up to him only minutes ago tied again around his wrist, in the pretty shape of a bow.
After this, Hao becomes too dizzy to keep his eyes open, and his body is too tired to fight the daze he falls into as the ceremony is carried out around him; within what feels like one breath, the man is pressing a chaste kiss to his cheek, and everyone is cheering for them, for the newlyweds, and they are husbands.
Hao keeps his eyes closed the entire time, leaning his weight against the man next to him lest he, in his dizziness, lose his balance and fall to the floor like a dead man, like Jiwoong.
“I don’t know your name,” he manages to slur as the man is scooping him into his arms, once the wedding has concluded and they are excused to return home with suggestive glances and raised eyebrows.
The stranger laughs. It’s, against all else, a wonderful sound. “You’re so silly, my Hao,” he says softly, cradling Hao close to his chest. “We’ve known each other since we were children. You must be exhausted; let’s get you home.”
Hao whines into the man’s neck, fingers clutching to the muscle of his shoulders. He doesn’t have enough strength in him to speak again.
It is after many minutes of being carried, the stranger’s footsteps steady and loud against the stone of the pathway they’re following to his home, his hands holding Hao with such a secure grip that it almost feels like love, that he gives Hao grace.
“Hanbin,” he mutters into the darkening sky, humming quietly. “We’ve met many times before. Don’t forget me again, my love.”
Hao is bedridden for seven days.
He’s ill, so ill that he can’t work, that he can’t even stand without collapsing from the disorienting spin of the Earth around him. Eating is impossible, as well, and Hanbin tries on multiple occasions to feed him soups of varying colors and flavors, but he vomits everything up into a shallow bucket Hanbin’s dragged inside and placed next to the bed.
They don’t speak to each other during this time, not a single word. Most of Hao’s time is spent sleeping—so much so that it worries him tremendously. He’s seen sickness; he is more intimately familiar with it than most. Still, he doesn’t recognize the chills that seize his body, the nausea that rots him from the inside. His ears are constantly ringing with the remains of a melody he doesn’t remember knowing, and among it all, there is his husband, cooking and cleaning and holding a warm rag to his forehead to bring down his fever.
After a week, the delirium finally begins to fade, and in its place comes all consuming, mind numbing fear.
He doesn’t know who Hanbin is. He doesn’t know where he’s come from, why they’ve married each other.
He doesn’t know if anyone buried Jiwoong’s body, or if, were he to have the strength to venture there himself, Hao would find him in the same position he left him in, rotting and sinking into the muddy floor of the field.
He tries to ask—tries to do anything other than lie in bed and eat from the spoon Hanbin feeds him from, but any attempt at standing or moving at all, really, brings a sharp shake of Hanbin’s head and a disappointed downturn of his lips. They still don’t speak to each other (Hao suspects Hanbin is gracefully waiting for Hao to decide when he is ready), but Hao knows enough about body language to recognize that Hanbin is unhappy with him whenever he pushes himself to recover on his own.
Over time, though, he does gain his strength back, along with his sharp mind; it’s a relieving thing, breaking out of the numb haze he’s been trapped within for the past week.
When he finds his voice, the first thing he asks for is water, which Hanbin produces for him seemingly out of thin air, offering him the glass with a steady hand and helping him sip from it slowly.
The second thing he asks is why, though this question is met with only silence and a gentle squeeze to his shoulder. And more water—Hanbin makes him gulp it down as if it’s liquid gold (with the way it soothes his parched throat and cools the aches in his bones, Hao dully thinks that maybe it is).
By the eighth night, Hao’s thoroughly hydrated and well enough rested to move around again and oh, he thinks he might be sick—it’s the eighth night. He was married eight days ago and they haven’t even consummated the marriage, and now the Gods likely hate them and will never bless them with prosperity. And Jiwoong’s dead, and Hao hasn’t left his house in over a week so he doesn’t even know if anyone cares, if anyone knows but him. Something has fallen over the town since Hao’s wedding, and he’s not sure if it’s a cloud or a cell of rain or a curse—regardless, it sours his tongue and sends a chill down his spine.
This is not the empire they fought for. This is something darker, something deadlier.
Hanbin is nothing if not a loving husband, day and night, showering Hao in his endless devotions. Hao doesn’t even know if the world continues to live on anymore, outside the four walls of their home.
Once Hao is well enough to cook and care for himself, Hanbin asks to return to work.
“A friend of mine has been running the bakery while I’ve been away,” he says quietly over his bowl of porridge, free hand stroking slowly up and down Hao’s thigh under the table. “But it would be good for me to return. I would like the income, so I can buy you pretty things when the market comes to town in the spring.”
Hao frowns into his breakfast, brow furrowing. “You’re a baker?” he asks slowly, carefully. Hanbin never seems to like questions about his life, especially his life before a week ago, before they were married—he’s not angry, never angry, but he is horribly avoidant, usually quieting Hao’s curiosities with a pat to his head or a spoon of broth to his lips.
Light as a feather and bright as day, Hanbin laughs. “Of course I am. I’ve always been a baker, darling. You know this.”
Hao loses his appetite immediately. He nods, pushing his bowl away from him lest he lose the contents of his stomach into it, and rubs at his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Of course you have,” he mutters emotionlessly, too tired to argue with the man who he knows is a stranger, the man he’s been wed to. “I’m sorry.”
Hanbin coos at him. “Don’t apologize, my love. You never need to apologize for anything. You’re perfect. I’ll never ask anything of you, and I’ll never be angry with you for anything. You could never make a mistake, so don’t worry about apologizing to me again, okay?”
Hao’s head is nodding before he can even think about it. It’s magnetizing, Hanbin’s voice, his commands. Hao can’t help but cede to it. “Okay,” he agrees, voice small. Hanbin giggles at him, pressing a kiss to his cheek before rinsing their bowls and slinging one of Hao’s bags over his shoulder, stepping out the door with a gentle wave and a kind smile. It shuts behind him with a loud bang, the sound ringing in Hao’s ears for longer than usual.
He sits at the table in suffocating silence, still as the chill of ice over the early morning grass, until the sun is high in the sky and it is warm enough to work in the garden.
They cook dinner together.
For the first few nights, Hanbin had insisted on doing everything on his own, but Hao was nothing if not persistent, and it turns out it’s easy enough to wear Hanbin down to nothing with a perfectly placed pout and wet, pathetic eyes—they stand together, now, shoulder to shoulder, in Hao’s small kitchen, Hanbin stirring the contents of the pot while Hao chops carrots on a smooth wooden cutting board.
It’s nice. Hao’s slow to admit it to himself, but against all else, it is nice. He’s been alone for so long.
“It’s going to start getting colder,” Hanbin chats absentmindedly, turning his head to glance at the man next to him. Hao pointedly does not meet his gaze. “I’m going to knit you a scarf. And gloves, if you’d like.” He brings the spoon he’s holding up to his lips, blowing on the contents before holding the utensil out to Hao. “Try.”
“Thank you.” Hao opens his mouth, wrapping his lips around the spoon, slurping the savory broth down gratefully. It’s delicious—Hanbin’s cooking always is. He says as much, before continuing to chop vegetables. “I already have those things,” he adds then, to address the other half of Hanbin’s statement. And it’s true; they get more and more snow in their town every year, of course Hao has learned to take care of himself amidst the cold.
“I know you do. But they’re old and fraying, I saw them in the closet. I can make you something better.”
“My mother made that scarf for me.”
“Mine will keep you warmer.”
Hao sighs, popping a slice of carrot into his mouth without a thought and chewing on it slowly, before reaching forward and dumping the rest of the vegetables on his cutting board into the pot of broth. “You’re that good with a needle?”
Hanbin nods eagerly, not unlike a puppy. “I’m good with everything.” He grins. “I will make you so many scarves, you’ll never feel cold a day in your life.” The lilt in his voice is so happy, so incredibly glad, that Hao doesn’t have the strength in him to argue. Hanbin gathers another spoonful of soup into his spoon, then, holding it out yet again—the smile on his face is wide enough to fall into. “You’ll never go hungry, either,” he adds happily. “I will take such good care of you.”
Under his careful touch, amidst the early bite of winter’s overeager jaw, Hao’s garden, as has become usual, thrives. It’s comforting to be able to work again, to find himself slipping back into some semblance of normalcy—he can feel Hanbin’s heavy gaze boring into the back of his head, but he ignores it in favor of digging his hands deeper into the rich soil to tug out the roots of an herb he needs for a new tonic. This tonic is for himself: to clear the mind. He drinks it every night, religiously. It doesn’t improve his condition in the slightest.
Hanbin has taken a liking to watching him work, in the evenings when the sun is low in the sky and the bakery is closed for the day. He’ll sit on the edge of the porch, steaming mug of tea in hand as he traps Hao under the weight of his unbearably tender gaze. Some nights, he sings, haunting melodies washing over Hao like rain, chilling him impossibly deeper than his bones—the sound is beautiful, so beautiful that Hao has to hold himself back from asking Hanbin, on the nights he does decide to sit in silence, to sing for him more.
“You’re going to hurt your back if you keep kneeling like that,” Hanbin calls out to him, voice lilting with both lightheartedness and obvious, potent worry. Hao stills his hands in the dirt and turns to face the man.
“I’ve been kneeling like this for my entire life,” he says back quietly. “I’ll survive.”
He watches as Hanbin sets his mug down on the lip of the porch’s first step, standing up and beginning to walk towards them. “Then it must already hurt,” he rebuts, Hao’s eyes glued determinedly to his feet as he approaches (Hanbin’s face is so devastatingly beautiful that he often finds himself, against his own will, getting lost in it and losing his ability to think, so he avoids the thing when he can).
“I’m fine.” And then, a lie. “I’m a doctor. I know what I’m talking about.”
He is not a doctor. Not on paper, not officially, not in any of the ways that are real, that matter. He doesn’t think Hanbin knows this. He doesn’t know if Hanbin knows anything about him, at all.
Hanbin only laughs, light and airy, as his hands come to rest on the slope of Hao’s shoulders and immediately press down, fingers rubbing gently into the crevices of his muscles to relieve the tension hiding there. “If you are a doctor,” he murmurs, “then your first patient should be yourself.”
“That’s silly. I’m not sick.”
“But you’re human, Hao. Why do you not take care of your own needs before everyone else’s, or even after? Even at all?”
Hao hums, closing his eyes as Hanbin continues to massage his shoulders. It feels nice—too nice, suggesting to him that maybe kneeling in the garden all day for all twenty years of his life has been doing slow, graceless damage to his body. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
“That’s ridiculous. Don’t say that.”
“I’m serious. Just because we—I mean, you don’t know me. I’m a stranger to you.”
Hanbin clicks his tongue disapprovingly, as he always does when Hao brings up their . . . situation. “You’re my husband,” he chides, one hand moving to the base of Hao’s neck to massage him there, too (Hao swallows back a whimper—it feels nice, impossibly so). “I love you. I worry about you. I know about you. All of these things are true, Hao. Stop denying me the right to care about my husband, please.”
Hao opens his eyes, then, looking up at the man standing above him. From this angle, with the setting sun casting a halo of light behind his figure, Hanbin almost looks like a God. “Do you?” he asks, voice small, eyes searching Hanbin’s unfamiliar face. “Do you love me?”
Hanbin nods immediately. “Yes. Wholly, entirely, unendingly.”
“Oh.”
“One day I will show you, darling. One day you will understand.” Hanbin drops to his knees, kneeling in front of Hao so that they’re now face to face. Hao sucks in a shaky breath when he is met with the sight of Hanbin’s beautiful features at such close proximity. “I love you. You’ve saved me. You are the reason I live, the reason I breathe, and so I will love you for the rest of my life.” He lets go of Hao’s shoulders to cradle his face in his hands, leaning forward to leave a chaste kiss on the corner of Hao’s mouth. “Never doubt my love for you,” he begs, eyes shining. “It’s the one thing in this world that will always be true.”
Hao’s head begins to spin, as it sometimes does in Hanbin’s presence, so he tears his eyes away from the distracting sight before him and absentmindedly begins to dig around in the soil once more; Hanbin, ever the talent at noticing when Hao is beginning to feel overwhelmed, releases his face from his hold and settles into the dirt next to him, folding his legs beneath him to watch him work from up close.
Together, with Hao’s calloused hands and Hanbin’s watchful eye, they bring in the evening’s harvest together.
He finally opens his shop again, and it is a wonderful thing—familiar faces, ones he hasn’t seen since his wedding (wrapped in serpents, screaming in terror, but he tries desperately to swallow down the bile and the memories and to forget) flock into the space like bugs. His shelves, restocked with care only moments before, are stripped empty within the hour, everyone desperate to get their hands on Hao’s eternally fresh produce, his miraculously healing tonics. A few people stop by for him specifically, striding up to his counter with excited eyes and blustering hands, inquiring about his newly budding marriage. None of them seem to even remember Jiwoong, so Hao keeps his name off his lips, though it’s a near thing.
“It’s so sweet,” an older woman croons happily as he wraps her purchase in soft brown paper. “We’ve all been waiting to see you two wed for so many years.”
Hao hums, tying the bundle in his hands securely with twine—this is something he’s heard a lot, recently: that he and Hanbin have been fated since they were children, that Hanbin’s had his eye on him for as long as the two of them could walk. That everyone in the town is elated to finally see childhood sweethearts, destined lovers, Hanbin and Hao, wed.
Not even Jiwoong had loved him to that extent, he wonders, which is particularly strange because Hanbin seems to otherwise fill the space in everyone’s minds where Jiwoong used to reside, as if the men are one in the same. (They’re not—Hao takes the long route to his shop every morning lest he be forced to pass by the field he and Hanbin were married in, the field he worries still carries a certain dead, rotting man in its embrace.)
He hands the woman her parcel of goods, smiling sweetly at her as she pinches his cheeks and thanks him with wide, grateful eyes, bidding him goodbye. There are few people in his shop, now, as most of his shelves are painstakingly empty once again. Seeing a temporary lull in customers waiting to be helped by him, he steps away from his counter and ducks into one of the back rooms to grab a few products from his reserve and restock at least part of the store.
As he works, he hears the front door swing open, but this is normal—his traffic is great, especially during seasons like this, when no one else’s gardens thrive in the same way his does, when the cold brings in illness that can only seem to be cured by medicines made by Hao’s own hand. He keeps his head down, working now on adjusting the labels on the jars of preserves lined up on one of the shelves; he hums to himself distractedly as he works, the lazy chatter of customers lulling him into comfortability, until he is startled out of his focused haze by an arm around his waist and a chaste kiss pressed to the skin of his throat.
“Husband,” Hanbin speaks quietly into the curve of his neck, reverently.
Hao stills, as Hanbin wraps himself around him in a quick embrace. It’s interesting—so terribly interesting, the way Hanbin touches him like this. It feels familiar, hauntingly, and Hao can’t for the life of him remember where he recognizes Hanbin’s gentle displays of affection from, but there is a part of him, deep behind his ribs, that knows the feeling of this.
“Is the bakery closed already?” Hao asks quietly, fingers absentmindedly fidgeting with a jar in front of him, Hanbin plastered to his back. “It’s hardly past noon.”
Hanbin chuckles into his skin. “No,” he replies, pulling away and using his hand on Hao’s waist to spin him around so they are facing each other. As always, Hanbin looks beautiful, flushed cheeks high, carrying his joyful smile to the heavens. “I brought you something to eat.”
“Oh.” Hao blinks slowly, as his eyes finally find the brown paper in Hanbin’s hand (identical to the paper he himself uses in his shop; Hanbin must’ve swiped some from his stash under their kitchen sink when he wasn’t looking). “Thank you. What is it?”
“Walnut bread. Do you like walnuts?”
It’s a silly question. Hao has felt the touch of starvation before; he has learned to like anything. “I do.”
Hanbin grins, eyes crinkling where his smile pulls his face taut. “Good!” he sings happily, and then he is taking Hao by the hand and leading him to one of the tables in the corner of the shop, sitting him down gently and patting his head. “I’ll watch the counter. You eat. It should still be warm.”
It continues, after this first day—Hanbin stops by often, with baked goods and gentle smiles and quick kisses pressed to his cheeks, his forehead, the corner of his lips. Hao comes to expect it, even, when the sun is high in the sky and his stomach is starting to grumble unhappily. Hanbin is always there, right when he is starting to miss him, right when he is starting to feel hunger—feeding him from his own hand, warming him with his touch.
“Tell me who you are,” he murmurs on one of these afternoons, over a steaming cup of tea and a slice of warm lemon bread.
“In love with you,” Hanbin says in response, then stands up and leaves.
But he must know. It’s only once he’s home and wrapped up in the comfortable darkness of night, sun fully sunken below the horizon and no longer spilling through the glass of their windows, that Hao again feels the courage to ask.
“Who are you?” spills from his lips, loud in the deafening silence, their bodies curled next to each other on the mattress but not quite touching. He can feel his hands shaking at his sides, so he tucks them underneath his cheek and turns away from where Hanbin is sprawled out; he can feel his husband watching him, eyes sharp in the darkness, but he doesn’t respond.
It’s, again, disappointing but unsurprising that Hanbin says nothing. Hao has come to expect it, but he can’t help the way his blood runs colder in the quiet.
A warm hand (too warm, as always; it’s like the entire sun is encapsulated within Hanbin’s body) comes to rest on his shoulder, gently tugging on him to prompt him to roll over. Hao doesn’t—it’s easier, in the cover of darkness, to let his fear outrule everything else, to find nothing but danger in Hanbin’s sharp features.
He breathes deeply through his nose. “I just want to know,” he speaks slowly, careful to keep his tone even, “where you came from. I don’t-” He squeezes his eyes shut, chewing on his bottom lip for a moment before continuing, ripping the dead skin off with his teeth. “I don’t remember. Please, Hanbin, I don’t remember. It’s unsettling.”
Hanbin’s hand caresses his shoulder once, twice before sliding down to wrap around his waist. His chest presses against Hao’s back, and the warmth that radiates from Hanbin’s skin envelops Hao in its cocoon, and it would almost be comforting if it wasn’t so terrifying.
“I’m afraid of you,” Hao whispers, hardly loud enough to be heard. “Please. Who are you?”
His eyes are still closed (though it’s trivial in the face of the darkness that’s consumed their home), so he feels but does not see the lips that press gently against the skin of his neck, chaste and quick and hot like a brand. “In love with you,” Hanbin breathes again into his skin, words stained with the violence of devotion, with the honesty of drowsiness. “You have nothing to fear, my darling.”
“If you loved me, you’d tell me-”
“Sleep, Hao.”
As always, his body immediately obeys, twisting to the tune of Hanbin’s sweet honey voice—his eyes are falling closed before he has the chance to refuse.
(Hao wakes to darkness, to an unfamiliar warmth pressing against his chest, pinning him to the bed.
Hanbin is nowhere to be seen, which is odd—throughout the weeks they’ve been living together, he’s never awoken to an empty bed before, but he can hardly think about it because there’s something, something familiar and warm and dark, and it’s here in the room with him, slipping underneath his sleep clothes and into his skin.
He hasn’t felt it in a while, but of course it’s still here—of course he isn’t lucky enough to shake off the shadowy curse that used to stalk him just like this. It must’ve been following him from afar, ever since he was married, but here it is again, now, lying in bed with him in the space where his husband should be.
He breathes shallowly, mouth falling open in a soundless gasp as he feels the thing caress him, fill the cavern of his body like a dripping poison. It’s warm, so warm, and gentle—Hao’s cheeks begin to flush and his eyes fall closed, chest rising and falling in quick succession.
“Who are you?” Hao whimpers into the quiet, empty room: a question he is intimately familiar with, these days, but this time it’s directed at the shadowy thing that hasn’t made his acquaintance in weeks, the echo of the shape of a man, that is pressing down on his body now and making him gasp. It hurts—but it feels good, so good, and Hao can’t breathe and his eyes are rolling back into his head and oh, right there, it’s pressing into him there, he can’t think, it’s so good-
He comes with an airy cry, back arching and mouth falling open in ecstasy. It happens so fast—and it goes on and on, until he’s gasping and writhing against the sheets, until he’s almost delirious with how much it is, with how unbearably good he feels.
There’s something wet against his cheek, like a kiss, impossibly gentle—and then he’s falling back into the darkness of sleep, so deep he feels like he’s drowning.)
Hanbin is on his knees in the dirt, hands working alongside Hao’s. His habit of watching has slowly turned into this: learning from Hao, how to pick and prune and nurture, how to grow and harvest a garden in the way he is so intimately familiar with.
“What do you want for dinner tonight?”
Hao purses his lips. “Hm. I don’t really have a preference.”
Hanbin’s shoulder presses against his, warm and grounding. “Are you sure? There have to be things you enjoy more than others.”
Hao is silent for a moment, as he focuses intently on pulling the roots from a bundle of herbs in his hand. “Anything warm,” he finally concludes, blinking the dirt out of his eyelashes. “Stew, or something of the sort.”
“Is pumpkin okay?”
Hao glances down at the pile of ripe gourds they’ve just collected, leaning against each other in the dirt. He giggles and nods. “I think that would be just fine.”
“Good.” Hanbin pats his head gently (he grumbles—surely there’s dirt in his hair now, and he’ll need to bathe once they return inside to wash it out).
They work in silence for a while, after that, their arms brushing as they sort through the produce, picking what’s ripe and tending to what’s not quite fully grown. It’s nice, for the first time in many years, to have someone to do the tedious chores like this with him. His parents, gone for almost as many years as they were present, used to kneel with him like this and teach him how to breed life with his hands. Now, he is the one teaching someone new, and it’s almost comforting—at least, for the first time in a long while, Hao does not feel alone.
He hopes he can get used to it. He hopes, surprisingly, that they can be like this for a long while.
“I think I am going to close the bakery for a while,” Hanbin says absentmindedly after a few more minutes of silence, as his fingers work to untangle the roots of a pretty purple flower from its siblings. “Maybe for a few weeks.”
Hao hums. “Why?”
The sun beats down unforgivingly on them, but autumn is beginning to give way to the slender fingers of winter, clawing at them, and so it, against all else, is not hot. Hao is wrapped in a thick wool scarf, Hanbin’s matching garment placed gently on the ground next to them (he always runs quite a bit hotter than Hao; he cannot wear their matching winter clothing for more than a few minutes, especially when they’re working, before he begins to overheat).
“I only want to bake for you,” Hanbin admits, brushing his fringe from his eyes with his arm. His soil-stained fingers find Hao’s in the dirt. “I don’t care about anyone else. Only you. Only my beautiful husband.”
Hao huffs out a small laugh. “What about all of the people who will go hungry without your bread?” he inquires, turning to observe Hanbin’s glowing face as he speaks. He looks so beautiful in the sun.
“Let them go hungry,” Hanbin breathes, achingly honest.
The air is stolen from Hao’s lungs all at once.
"They'll die," he mutters, hardly loud enough to be heard.
Hanbin's resolve doesn't crumble—he smiles, glowing like the bruise of a fire. It's such a beautiful thing that Hao's chest begins to feel tight; he takes a deep breath to ground himself, but is left horribly breathless yet again with Hanbin's next words: "Let them die."
It shouldn't feel like grace. It shouldn't feel like home, God, Hao should be horrified—but he isn't. He's warm, so incredibly warm, and his heart is so full he thinks it might burst from his chest.
He leans forward without a thought, cheeks pink from the biting cold and the weight of Hanbin’s devotion for him, and presses their lips together.
Hao takes the shorter route to his shop the next day. When he passes by the church, he bravely lifts his head, and he finds that he was right all along—there, at the edge of the field, is the unmistakable outline of a decomposing body. The smell reaches Hao’s nose even from afar, too, and it’s putrid.
He turns away and keeps walking.