[fic] Dearest Friend
Author ofolivesnginger
Fandom: EXO
Pairing: Kris/Luhan, Sehun/Luhan
Rating: NC17
Words: 5,524
Warnings: Death, sensitive subject matters
Summary: Listen to the old man sitting on the park bench.
a/n: have i broken my promise to never break krishan? i must ask you to decide for yourselves, gentle friends. this is not the ideal holiday present, but alas, winter always messes with my feelings. regardless, better times will come, i promise. ♡
1.
They only met three times before they got here:
First time was at the whole sitting down thing, around a big conference table with the parents on each side like the school debate teams always did. The fathers sat at the two long ends. “Pass me the-,” the one closer to the window nods over, and the shadow cuts his torso like a royal sash. A lighter slides across the waxed mahogany, all the way across, zips past the gazes of the four lined around the length like legs of the red dragon. One side sits in the dark, along with the unlit half of the other side’s father. The lit side has their eyes down.
A light blinks, blinks back again. One mom leans back and bounces her leg. One dad opens his mouth, and smoke liberates itself from the bars of his metallic teeth. “This is Yifan,” he says, to the last one in the room to know, as if it made the man who’s sat across her the past two hours any less foreign. “Yifan, child, can you pass the peanuts?”
“Sure, sir.”
He stands up, and the chair barely scrapes the floor. He takes the peanut tray over to the end of the table where Luhan’s dad’s puffing smoke behind a porcelain candelabra. He puts down the peanut tray and sits back. Luhan’s dad cracks the shells open with his teeth, and the ring of it momentarily reminds her of the time her father held her firmly on his shoulders, and the two of them shouted into the vacancy at the bottom of the Yanshan Mountains.
Luhan keeps her head down. It’s her only rebellion, even when she knows you can never get anywhere with silence.
The second time they met was in a dark room lit by one sole lantern outside the window, hung on a metal hook, swaying in the autumn wind. There was no light in the room, and no warmth beyond the single sheet on the single bed, folded into a stern cube. There’s a table by the window, and it was this table that Luhan was climbing when the door opened, and the light outside lit the room for a few momentous seconds, past the silhouette of the boy in the threshold, and with his hand on the handle he sees her fixed there-knee on the table, cotton socks tumbling off her thin calves, long hair whipped like knotting wheat and skirt blown silly, white sliver of her undergarment giggling at him from beneath, and a face frozen in the lamplight, oblivious, hand outstretched as if for some distant salvation. Her waist is pale, her face washed with the adolescent glow of baby pink. “I’m only getting the light,” she says, like it’s important that he knows she’s not about to throw herself out the window. Then she leans out again, skirt crept up so far the soft white of her wrapped buttocks has the time to glance and greet, “How do you do?”.
“Here.” Luhan hops off the table with the lantern in her hand. He takes it, and she stands before him then, looking up at him with the same emptiness that he feels looking down at her pretty face. She watches him, for a reason. The bed sits untouched, for a reason, just like how the doors are locked and the walls are thin, for a reason. There are ears outside, waiting. She opens her mouth and whispers “I’m not doing any of this with you”. He wants to say “you took the words right out of my mouth”, but gets distracted when he notices the crusted corner of one of her eyes and gets the urge to wipe it off for her.
The third time they met they hurriedly whispered a few more things and the minister whispered back and in the shadows of some attic at a family home in some forest they were married.
2.
Right now, it’s a different bed Luhan lies on. Here’s a different house. Here’s a different moon, but here are the same people still as the day they sat face to face with each other, much like they are now. Her clenched fists and his clenched teeth as he undresses her is their testimony. He tries not to touch her regardless.
“Do you hate me?” He mumbles absentmindedly.
She shakes her head, looking kind of resigned. He undoes the buttons on her blouse, pulling the fabric away from her chest as he does, trying not to graze anything with a careless knuckle. She’s pulling the bedsheets into fists, and it makes his mouth go dry the way it did when his old friends made out with their girlfriends in front of him. She releases the sheets, and the shirt comes off. A hand brings her chest up off the bed, the same one that unclips her bra. Yifan slides the straps off, and without saying anything buries his face into her small, soft bosom.
The door is shut, but not locked; there’s no one else in the house. The walls are thick, and the blinds are drawn across the only window. The air is warm, and yet Luhan still shudders. Yifan props himself up above her, and there are red spots on her chest fading as they breathe together. He takes her waist, and with all his strength on his folded calves leans down and whispers.
“It’s my job to-to impregnate you.”
“Go on then,” her voice trembles.
He breaks into her, as gently as he knows, like a stone plunging past the still surface of a pond, sinking the way his heart does when she bleeds a thin trail of red all over the starched white of their bed. He lies down on top of her afterwards, catching his breath until she rolls him over and straddles his hips. When she detaches the two of them with her small hand, he watches the remnants trickle out of her, gather on his own skin, and the sight of how upright she kneels there looking down at him makes the little pool at the bottom of his abdomen burn a little.
3.
They’re having roasted duck as a main course, sitting across each other for dinner. Luhan didn’t make the duck, but she cooked the vegetable dishes alongside. Her mom brought the duck in a basket just a while ago, and when Yifan peeked into the box and saw its crispy roasted skin, bronzed and buttered and glimmering under the apartment’s bulb he was insanely eager to dig in. Now, though, when Luhan’s actually filled the table and sliced some pieces for them, it doesn’t seem like he’s hungry at all.
She dips a piece in the thick black sauce, and gets a little too much, too salty. She wipes off a side on her rice.
“The Russians are writing junk about us again,” Yifan says from across the table, and the paper in his hands rustles when he moves to pull the cigarette out from between his teeth. He holds it pointed at the table now, unknowingly, and Luhan watches the smoke waft dangerously close, like it’s trying to smoke the duck a second time. Irritated, she plucks it out of his hand, and snuffs it out against an empty dish. Yifan looks over then, notes her grimace, shrugs nonchalantly and turns back to his paper.
“It says here:” he raps the paper with a knuckle, “Last Sunday, a Russian journalist published an article denouncing the Chinese educational system, rousing immediate discussion...data showed...says here: the system is incorrectly focused, excessive in material, and frigid, discouraging creativity, stuff like that.”
“Coming from Russians?”
“Funny, isn’t it. People are writing back, at least.”
“Well, they’re great at teaching hypocrisy.”
Yifan reaches across the table, and plucks a piece of duck with his bare hands. He drops it in the sauce and gets his finger dirty trying to fish it out. Luhan sighs, and pulls out a piece of tissue from the box, but she watches Yifan suck it right off, even though she keeps telling him how toxic the newspaper ink is and how easily it gets onto your hands.
They talk about crop production, droughts being warned on the charts, and genetics. Still Luhan gets mad, and flings his paper onto the couch, forcing a pair of chopsticks into his hand. He’s picking off the meat on the duck’s bones, and she stares at a slice of pepper in her bowl, waiting to get picked up again. “Tell me about college.”
Yifan’ head snaps up. He drops the bones in their litter tray, watching her watch her pepper for the longest time, trying to pick a shred of meat out of his teeth with his tongue. “What do you want to know?”
“What are the people like?” She says.
Different, is the first thing that jumps to mind, but there’s no way he will say this to her if he even knew her a little. He thinks about the guys he’d known for a few years, was just getting to know. He thinks about the girls. It’s been a long time.
Yifan comes back with a photo. “I found this the other day,” he says, even though he’d known where it had been tucked for a long time, but Luhan doesn’t seem to have heard, dragging her fingers over the glossy surface. There are about twenty people in two rows, sitting and standing in the front yard of a flat house with teal doors and teal windowsills and a teal roof. Potted plants droop by the entrance. The back row features a bunch of gangly guys, who slump in all directions like beaten sacs of vegetables. Their faces are scrunched, as if blinded by the sun overhead. Yifan is the third from the left in the back row, one arm slung around a shorter guy beside him, and his other hand rested gently on the shoulder of the girl sitting on a fold up chair in front of him.
He’s watching Luhan, but she doesn’t comment, doesn’t seem to dwell. “That’s...long past,” he says anyway. “She died from leukemia.”
Luhan looks up, but Yifan’s looking down now, finger on the photo.
“She died, and a while after I left this guy here died too from a car crash. This girl here and this guy got married.”
Luhan turns away, her lips sealed tight. She picks up her chopsticks again, but it’s as if she’d forgotten their purpose, staring at the piece of pepper she still hasn’t eaten as if she couldn’t recognize what it is.
He watches her secretly, waiting.
“Are you curious?”
“No,” she says. Her eyes don’t stray, not once, from the pepper.
4.
The week before Luhan turns 34, Yifan’s mother comes to visit. She brings the kids some professionally wrapped presents and watches with him from the couch as they fight over whose is bigger. “Yifan, you know, women get a little difficult to deal with when they’re in their mid thirties,” she says regretfully. He chuckles a little, ready to open his mouth to assure her when she turns away suddenly, and a manicured hand with blood red nails and wrinkling skin flies to her mouth.
“Yifan, I’m sorry, child, I’m so sorry.”
She looks off into the distance, eyes clouded with some revelation, like its just hit her after fifteen years what they’d done, meanwhile during this time telephone lines had been stretched, color TV was invented, internet came into existence. She observes it now happening all round her with an abashed apology on her mouth, hung comically open in horror. He lets her cry. She starts wailing on the couch, so loud that the kids from the kitchen hear and rush over, and he has to herd them into his study and type in the password for them so they can use the computer. He closes the door on his way out, and his mother’s still crying when he’s back. Yifan stands on the edge of the carpet, a sea of red dividing the two of them as if he can’t bear to take a step closer.
“Don’t say this now, mom.”
She chokes on her tears, and sobs even harder. Her snot is falling, and she’s desperately trying to block it with her wrists. Near Yifan, on Luhan’s little boudoir is a box of tissues, but he watches his mother stuff her snot back into her nose and suddenly feels a wondrous detachment, like he’d lost his limbs, and the only thing he can do is watch until she’s destroyed the sleeves of her shirt and seen herself out the door.
That night, with the kids put into bed and Luhan lying under the covers, Yifan goes to shower, and he stays with the water on his back and fist against the wall for a long time, trying to drown out every thought. When he comes back the kitchen light is on. He finds Luhan with her back turned, straight as always, pretty shoulder blades jutting out from the thin straps of her tank top. She hears the drag of his slippers on the tiles and spins around, glass of something alcoholic in her hand. “What’s the matter?” He says softly. She drinks the rest of the glass, sighs from deep in her lungs, and puts the cup in the sink. He watches approach and tentatively stop in front of him.
Slowly, Luhan brushes a hand down the side of Yifan’s arm, trails it up and down again. He watches her back, tensing and wondering, amazed. He picks her up by the waist, and with her legs around him he carries her backwards into their bedroom. He traps her against his chest and the wall, both of them breathing quick and shallow. “I want to touch you-”
“Why?” He closes his eyes, leaning their foreheads together.
“It’s been...a while…” She doesn’t say more. He understands. They fumble over the bed, shedding layers, and Luhan looks salacious with her short hair tossed, wet strands still knit from the shower. She grips his broad shoulders like a safety handle, and sits, not a heartbeat wasted, waving her waist with a fervor he doesn’t remember. She’s not the girl she was at 18 anymore, it’s painfully clear. The youthful dexterity and grace had gone from her body. It hurts him to hear her breathless panting so soon, when the even sheets below them haven’t warmed.
Yifan takes her air, puts her on her front against the bed, and fucks her roughly with an arm wrapped around her thin waist. It’s the first time he lets himself think about how attractive Luhan’s always been, how endearing, and in another life, if he was given the chance, all the things he might have done to court her, all the happiness he would have felt mumbling lines in an attic, all the Gods he would have thanked to be here right now. He wonders if in that world she would feel the same.
Luhan climaxes with Yifan’s tongue on her and her trembling thighs pressed wide open by his large hands. He lies back down beside her, both of them panting roughly in the dark.
“Thank you,” she whispers. All his dreams dissipate.
5.
When their youngest son turns 12 in the last year of elementary school, the grad class is sent off to a four day camping trip to a ranch in the countryside, and on the day of the return Luhan waits in her wine colored goose down jacket at 5:30 in the morning with the sun barely up, blowing into her hands. The parking lot is decked with a sparse smattering of parents waiting for the headlights of the bus to break into the horizon, all antsy on their feet. Luhan leans against a beam with her hands stuck in her pockets, absentmindedly watching the orange of the sunrise.
Somewhere ahead, a car pulls in. She watches a young man climb out of the driver’s seat, shutting the dashboard light. The stuffed dice hanging from his rearview mirror swings as the door slams. He looks around, noticing the families waiting engaged in their own hushed conversations. Luhan isn’t paying attention when he walks close enough for her to hear.
“Sorry to bother you, Miss, when is the pickup time again?”
Luhan looks over. The boy is incredibly young, sporting hoodie in soft grey, lighter than the asphalt, with the name of his university embroidered over his chest. He’s tall, his legs sculpted and long in his blue jeans. Up close, his hair is bleached blond, silvery blond, pushed back and out, then tucked in behind his ears. Pink seeps under his pale skin, in his cheeks, ears and nose. He’s got eyes like slices of honeydew, curled prettily from the smile on his thin lips. For the briefest moment, Luhan is simultaneously bewitched and enthralled by the fleeting thought that he is what she had been years ago, but it passes before a second thought. “Six o’clock, in twenty minutes.”
“Thank you so much,” he breathes, eyes thinning when his smile stretches. He stands with his back straight, not at all afraid of the morning chill, tapping his foot and humming to himself. But Luhan feels from within her core that he’s watching her discreetly, some feeling beyond intuition. She chances looking over, and finds his eyes on her. He smiles when they meet.
“Who are you here for?” She says.
“Ah, Wu Yixun,” he says, and Luhan’s heart skips a beat. He senses her alarm, and runs a hand through his cotton hair, all the way to the back of his neck. “It’s, it’s a Korean name.” He pronounces the name again, this time in his native tongue, and Luhan is entranced by the strangeness of the syllables.
“I’m Oh Sehun, his brother.” Sehun holds out his broad hand.
Luhan looks at it, clenching her own hand in her pocket before pulling it out quickly and shaking it. Sehun’s hand isn’t cold or warm, but it has a quality of softness. “I’m Wu Yeran’s mother, Luhan. Nice to meet you.”
6.
They’re standing in front of the doorway of the Oh’s’ household, parents behind the kid with his mittened finger on the doorbell. The door opens to the gentle face of a woman Luhan has met a few times before, smiling in a way she’s used to, with the same sweet eyes as her son. “Ah, the whole family’s here.” She chuckles with a naturally soft voice, and it comes out bubbling. “Come in, come on in.”
Mrs. Oh moves out of the doorway, and Yeran greets her “Hello auntie” before stepping in and shucking his shoes. How are you, sweetie? Good, auntie. Luhan unbuckles her Mary Janes, and when she straightens she catches Sehun coming in from the kitchen. Her gaze lashes away from some kind of impulse she won’t let herself think about.
Yeran runs into Sehun’s legs, shouting his Chinese name ungracefully across the room. Sehun’s face melts when he picks the kid up by his armpits, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Luhan watches Sehun carry her son away, madly giggling, drumming his little woolen fists against the firm back in a white tee. Sehun sets him down at the stairs. “Go get ready for your sleepover, kid.”
The mother sits the two of them down at the dining table, promising some tea that she won’t allow them to reject. Around the rectangular thing, Yifan sits beside Luhan with his elbows propped, observing the warmth of the house with a trancelike serenity. Everything is in motion. The lamps in the corner stains the walls a marmalade yellow. A fireplace crackles, and beside the fireplace a grandfather clock rocks side to side with patience. The television set flashes soundlessly behind the fish tank, shape distorted by its convex glass belly, and a goldfish ambles about his little world. The pot on the stove whistles, and Mrs. Oh stands from her chair and picks it off the stovetop. Upstairs, children are running and shouting. Luhan wonders what Yifan feels in a space like this, a home so suffocatingly, but rightfully, blamelessly alive.
Sehun comes back a while after and pours himself a cup of tea. He sits on Luhan’s other side, around the corner at the short end of the table, and talks to Yifan as if they are colleagues. Luhan’s hands begin to quiver, and she puts the cup down and clenches her sweaty fists on her lap. Yifan leaves to the washroom, and once the door closes Luhan tries again to pick up her cup. She blows at the surface, then sips, and puts the cup back down. She crosses her arms on her lap, and stares off out into the dark beyond the kitchen window. Minutes pass, dreadful and dead quiet.
Gently, Sehun takes her hand under the table.
She jerks from shock, but she’s frozen in the loose grasp and doesn’t pull back. Her eyes snap to his, and everything she could’ve asked him or said to him is there on his face. There’s a conviction he wears that she’s shaken by, because she’s never seen that look on anyone before, not even when she was promised eternity during their vows. For a moment she thinks that it’s an illusion, that she only thinks she sees all these missing things in him because she told him about the missing things, inconceivably drunk, and at the time ineffably lonely. The first tidal wave that hits is regret, and then guilt, and when the bathroom door opens and she can suddenly feel her hand again, the shame.
Sehun lets go, but he must know he has rung the bell and cannot go back. It plagues her on the way home, in the car, in the house, in the shared bedroom, in the bathroom where she touches her own ageing face in the mirror as if it were a stranger’s skin, a stranger’s scar, a stranger’s wrinkles. Your smile looks beautiful, Mrs. Wu, Sehun tells her. Luhan smiles at herself and thinks she looks like a corpse.
7.
She shows up back at the house the next morning, ready to take her kid away, but nobody answers the doorbell. Luhan tries the knob and finds it unlocked.
“Hello?”
There’s no response. She walks into the house, shutting the door behind her. “Hello?”
There’s music coming from upstairs, and it stops a moment after she calls out for the third time. “Mrs. Wu?” Comes a muffled yell upstairs. Luhan heaves a sigh, relaxing her whole tensed up body, shaking her head. She climbs the stairs, lecture ready on her tongue when she walks into the only room with its door open and meets eyes with Sehun, hair and clothes a mess, climbing off of his bed in shock.
“Where’s...everybody else?”
Luhan stutters, quickly averting her eyes from Sehun, who’s currently clad in nothing but a tank and grey underwear. She feels overwhelmingly invasive being in his room, his space, that it almost translates to a sense of danger. There are books scattered on his mattress, and a pencil behind his ear. He is almost timid.
“Mom and Dad took the kids to breakfast, and then they were headed to the amusement park...they called Uncle Wu before they left, I thought he would have…”
Sehun grabs a pair of pants off the back of a chair, and he looks over at Luhan with a slight blush. Luhan quickly turns away while he dresses, gaze falling upon the corner of his work space-his desk is piled and disheveled, littered with loose pages of notes and books flattened at the spine. She walks up to it, and with a hand grazes over the pages of some opened college textbooks, tracing the lines of words there. There are brochures from school sports clubs, exams folded and tucked in folders. An agenda, filled almost to the brim with red ink, marks dates and hours and minutes of a life following the bells of a system whose sound Luhan has almost forgotten.
Behind her, Sehun notices how she stands, fascinated with this microcosm, and stops changing. He backs out of the shirt half pulled over his chest. Then, with silent steps, he walks up behind her, plasters his chest into her back, and brackets her with his arms propped on the edge of the table.
“Luhan.”
“Oh, we shouldn’t do this-”
He kisses the nape of her neck, where her short hair ends. She’s trying hard to hold her composure, but cannot suppress the bodily shudder that sends her spine rolling, and her back firmly into his warm chest. Luhan has her eyes closed, leaning away from where Sehun’s head hangs, breathing softly into the collar of her dress. Her skin flushes pink, and she smiles wryly, painfully at how out of control and ridiculous this had become. “I’m a mother.”
Sehun shakes his head, hair softly bouncing, and kisses her neck again. “Doesn’t matter.”
She laughs once, a little choked, throat a little dry. She doesn’t stop shaking her head as Sehun’s hands wrap around her, as his fingers drag over her cotton wrapped skin. “Luhan-” His hand reaches lower, until he is cupping the heat between her legs. Her head rolls right back onto his shoulder. “My sex has borne more than you can ever give me,” she whispers, voice on the verge of cracking, and she knows in this moment that she can’t win.
“It’s ok.”
Sehun presses his hand over her stomach, the hollows of her flower drum, where the absent beat of a child’s kicking feet and fumbling hands plays in the recess mapped out by the holy seal of his hand to the back of her spine. He undresses her while they stand there, nimble fingers of a craftsman unbuttoning his way down the center of her chest, until he slides the cotton down her shoulders and it piles like satin at her feet. He makes love to her on his desk, among his tumbling pen holders and textbooks where her flailing limbs swim, engulfed by the sea of knowledge. He fucks her on her side on the bed with a sore leg raised by a hand at the knee. He bends her in unimaginable ways, so far that she tears up at times from the stretch, but the sobs from her throat is her crying out, from discovering again the whole rusted breadth of her heart, as if she’s forgotten how it felt to be alive, how it felt not to be always bleeding.
Three weeks later, Luhan woke up with the terror of a shrieking bolt of lightning splitting right behind her eyes, bathed in her own sweat on their bed, and with a dead certainty that neither she nor anyone else could comprehend she announced to Wu Yifan she was pregnant.
8.
The memory Luhan takes to Hell with her is the one where, in the dark of night, before her own shaking figure she witnesses Yifan’s face come alive in the purest, most sacrosanct form of rapture, pause, and then as if suddenly understanding, collapses in on itself eternally, as if she can hear the gargantuan rumble of his bones crumbling into heaps of ash, as if she can smell the burn of his distant heart on fire.
9.
Yifan holds her hand through the delivery, they way he’s done it twice before.
There’s a baby. She lies in the crib, and she rolls around, and gurgles and burps and wets her diaper. Yifan rolls her around to sleep on her side, and pats her back and feeds her powder and washes her diapers. She looks like newborns do, like someone clawed into a batch of dough and drew a scrunched face. Yifan still doesn’t know whose she is. Luhan swore she won’t say. “You’d kill him. Or your dad will.” She’d said. What the fuck is gonna be the kid’s last name then? Her face was green, eyes downright dead. It’s going to be Wu.
Luhan hasn’t spoken since the delivery, not a word. Yifan was half expecting her to say “Thank you” again, but she was so worn out by the time the baby came out that she fainted before she could even see the child in the bloodied hands of the nurses. Yifan is the first to hold her, even though there is red hot blood erupting within him as he gently carries the bundle in the baby pink towel. She smiles, and she coos, and she curls her little hands just like any baby does. For the first two days Luhan sleeps, and Yifan holds the baby, begging Luhan to wake up, so lost from any sense of direction that he starts to go mad.
In the first few days of Luhan’s consciousness, she sits on their bed looking out the window. The digestive system in her shuts down, and once there are three days when she doesn’t go to the washroom, even if Yifan cooks and feeds her by the bed. It becomes quickly obvious that she’s not getting any less feeble, and on the 8th day a doctor comes and says she’s caught a bad fever. For a week Luhan slips in and out of consciousness, until she would wake to take some medicine and fall asleep again for days. Yifan father calls the best doctors from across the country, and they come bearing their own family recipes and medical instruments in suitcases. They poke and prod, but none of them can tell him what’s wrong with her. Luhan lies in their bed shedding herself, eyes closed firmly, mouth curving just the slightest as if caught in a sweet dream, where every ounce of weight tacked onto her flesh crumbles right off, until she is finally unrecognizable and free.
With a baby in his arms and two kids by his sides, Yifan watches Luhan evaporate before his eyes, and the light in his eyes slowly dies with her.
10.
He wakes up one night to find the other side of the bed empty.
Clambering, he finds the lights, slamming them on all the way to the kitchen where he finds her slumped on the cold tiled floor against the fridge, breathing shallowly. The moment he sees her he lets out a pathetic moan, hand over his eyes as if he is going to cry. She looks over, coughs a few times. “Sorry about this,” she croaks. “I was a little hungry.” Luhan tries to smile, but the face she ends up making has Yifan knitting his brows together. She tries to push herself off the floor, but collapses a few times. “No don’t, I can stand.”
She can’t, and they both know it. Yifan kneels to pick her up off the floor, and she’s too tired to push him away, eyes closing and head leaned against his shoulder.
He carries her bridal style, and she’s light as a feather. He can’t bear to look at her ribcage peeking out from the top of her collar. She hangs onto his neck like a holiday ornament hanging by the fireplace, a snowflake. Back in the room, he sets her down, and lies beside her. He turns off the light and listens to her frosty breath.
“You know, when I was born...I wasn’t meant to be named Luhan.”
Yifan turns his head, looks at her.
“My father told me that on the day I was born, he asked my mother for my name, and she said,” Luhan takes his hand, and in his palm traces two characters. “‘Luhan’. Han for cold, for winter.”
“My father thought it was too unlucky, so he made me the dawn instead. His little dawn. Now look at me, I’m gonna die from the cold.”
“Don’t say that. Please.”
Yifan remembers, the days spent in the hospital right before their first child was born, when Luhan lay on the cot and listened to him tell stories about almost anything. He had two older brothers, in a family with three generations of officials, he explained. His mother named him Yifan, thinking he would grow up just like any ordinary boy. When their first son was born, Luhan named him Yufan, rich and sophisticated, giggling to herself as if she thought he wouldn’t notice the little scheme. When their second child was born, Yifan named him after Luhan: Yeran, like the midnight burning, like the dawn.
“Did you ever feel for me?” She croaks.
“Will it make a difference now, if I said?”
“I guess not.”
Yifan’ eyes blur, so he shut them tight, shuts them so tight. Slowly he turns Luhan’s curled palm, and with a quivering finger sketches a character into her hand. Beside him, Luhan holds back a whimper, and Yifan’s own chattering teeth clench.
“Twenty years is a long time.”
Their fingers tangle, clutching inseparably, shaking together.
Thank you for being kind.
end.
Fandom: EXO
Pairing: Kris/Luhan, Sehun/Luhan
Rating: NC17
Words: 5,524
Warnings: Death, sensitive subject matters
Summary: Listen to the old man sitting on the park bench.
a/n: have i broken my promise to never break krishan? i must ask you to decide for yourselves, gentle friends. this is not the ideal holiday present, but alas, winter always messes with my feelings. regardless, better times will come, i promise. ♡
1.
They only met three times before they got here:
First time was at the whole sitting down thing, around a big conference table with the parents on each side like the school debate teams always did. The fathers sat at the two long ends. “Pass me the-,” the one closer to the window nods over, and the shadow cuts his torso like a royal sash. A lighter slides across the waxed mahogany, all the way across, zips past the gazes of the four lined around the length like legs of the red dragon. One side sits in the dark, along with the unlit half of the other side’s father. The lit side has their eyes down.
A light blinks, blinks back again. One mom leans back and bounces her leg. One dad opens his mouth, and smoke liberates itself from the bars of his metallic teeth. “This is Yifan,” he says, to the last one in the room to know, as if it made the man who’s sat across her the past two hours any less foreign. “Yifan, child, can you pass the peanuts?”
“Sure, sir.”
He stands up, and the chair barely scrapes the floor. He takes the peanut tray over to the end of the table where Luhan’s dad’s puffing smoke behind a porcelain candelabra. He puts down the peanut tray and sits back. Luhan’s dad cracks the shells open with his teeth, and the ring of it momentarily reminds her of the time her father held her firmly on his shoulders, and the two of them shouted into the vacancy at the bottom of the Yanshan Mountains.
Luhan keeps her head down. It’s her only rebellion, even when she knows you can never get anywhere with silence.
The second time they met was in a dark room lit by one sole lantern outside the window, hung on a metal hook, swaying in the autumn wind. There was no light in the room, and no warmth beyond the single sheet on the single bed, folded into a stern cube. There’s a table by the window, and it was this table that Luhan was climbing when the door opened, and the light outside lit the room for a few momentous seconds, past the silhouette of the boy in the threshold, and with his hand on the handle he sees her fixed there-knee on the table, cotton socks tumbling off her thin calves, long hair whipped like knotting wheat and skirt blown silly, white sliver of her undergarment giggling at him from beneath, and a face frozen in the lamplight, oblivious, hand outstretched as if for some distant salvation. Her waist is pale, her face washed with the adolescent glow of baby pink. “I’m only getting the light,” she says, like it’s important that he knows she’s not about to throw herself out the window. Then she leans out again, skirt crept up so far the soft white of her wrapped buttocks has the time to glance and greet, “How do you do?”.
“Here.” Luhan hops off the table with the lantern in her hand. He takes it, and she stands before him then, looking up at him with the same emptiness that he feels looking down at her pretty face. She watches him, for a reason. The bed sits untouched, for a reason, just like how the doors are locked and the walls are thin, for a reason. There are ears outside, waiting. She opens her mouth and whispers “I’m not doing any of this with you”. He wants to say “you took the words right out of my mouth”, but gets distracted when he notices the crusted corner of one of her eyes and gets the urge to wipe it off for her.
The third time they met they hurriedly whispered a few more things and the minister whispered back and in the shadows of some attic at a family home in some forest they were married.
2.
Right now, it’s a different bed Luhan lies on. Here’s a different house. Here’s a different moon, but here are the same people still as the day they sat face to face with each other, much like they are now. Her clenched fists and his clenched teeth as he undresses her is their testimony. He tries not to touch her regardless.
“Do you hate me?” He mumbles absentmindedly.
She shakes her head, looking kind of resigned. He undoes the buttons on her blouse, pulling the fabric away from her chest as he does, trying not to graze anything with a careless knuckle. She’s pulling the bedsheets into fists, and it makes his mouth go dry the way it did when his old friends made out with their girlfriends in front of him. She releases the sheets, and the shirt comes off. A hand brings her chest up off the bed, the same one that unclips her bra. Yifan slides the straps off, and without saying anything buries his face into her small, soft bosom.
The door is shut, but not locked; there’s no one else in the house. The walls are thick, and the blinds are drawn across the only window. The air is warm, and yet Luhan still shudders. Yifan props himself up above her, and there are red spots on her chest fading as they breathe together. He takes her waist, and with all his strength on his folded calves leans down and whispers.
“It’s my job to-to impregnate you.”
“Go on then,” her voice trembles.
He breaks into her, as gently as he knows, like a stone plunging past the still surface of a pond, sinking the way his heart does when she bleeds a thin trail of red all over the starched white of their bed. He lies down on top of her afterwards, catching his breath until she rolls him over and straddles his hips. When she detaches the two of them with her small hand, he watches the remnants trickle out of her, gather on his own skin, and the sight of how upright she kneels there looking down at him makes the little pool at the bottom of his abdomen burn a little.
3.
They’re having roasted duck as a main course, sitting across each other for dinner. Luhan didn’t make the duck, but she cooked the vegetable dishes alongside. Her mom brought the duck in a basket just a while ago, and when Yifan peeked into the box and saw its crispy roasted skin, bronzed and buttered and glimmering under the apartment’s bulb he was insanely eager to dig in. Now, though, when Luhan’s actually filled the table and sliced some pieces for them, it doesn’t seem like he’s hungry at all.
She dips a piece in the thick black sauce, and gets a little too much, too salty. She wipes off a side on her rice.
“The Russians are writing junk about us again,” Yifan says from across the table, and the paper in his hands rustles when he moves to pull the cigarette out from between his teeth. He holds it pointed at the table now, unknowingly, and Luhan watches the smoke waft dangerously close, like it’s trying to smoke the duck a second time. Irritated, she plucks it out of his hand, and snuffs it out against an empty dish. Yifan looks over then, notes her grimace, shrugs nonchalantly and turns back to his paper.
“It says here:” he raps the paper with a knuckle, “Last Sunday, a Russian journalist published an article denouncing the Chinese educational system, rousing immediate discussion...data showed...says here: the system is incorrectly focused, excessive in material, and frigid, discouraging creativity, stuff like that.”
“Coming from Russians?”
“Funny, isn’t it. People are writing back, at least.”
“Well, they’re great at teaching hypocrisy.”
Yifan reaches across the table, and plucks a piece of duck with his bare hands. He drops it in the sauce and gets his finger dirty trying to fish it out. Luhan sighs, and pulls out a piece of tissue from the box, but she watches Yifan suck it right off, even though she keeps telling him how toxic the newspaper ink is and how easily it gets onto your hands.
They talk about crop production, droughts being warned on the charts, and genetics. Still Luhan gets mad, and flings his paper onto the couch, forcing a pair of chopsticks into his hand. He’s picking off the meat on the duck’s bones, and she stares at a slice of pepper in her bowl, waiting to get picked up again. “Tell me about college.”
Yifan’ head snaps up. He drops the bones in their litter tray, watching her watch her pepper for the longest time, trying to pick a shred of meat out of his teeth with his tongue. “What do you want to know?”
“What are the people like?” She says.
Different, is the first thing that jumps to mind, but there’s no way he will say this to her if he even knew her a little. He thinks about the guys he’d known for a few years, was just getting to know. He thinks about the girls. It’s been a long time.
Yifan comes back with a photo. “I found this the other day,” he says, even though he’d known where it had been tucked for a long time, but Luhan doesn’t seem to have heard, dragging her fingers over the glossy surface. There are about twenty people in two rows, sitting and standing in the front yard of a flat house with teal doors and teal windowsills and a teal roof. Potted plants droop by the entrance. The back row features a bunch of gangly guys, who slump in all directions like beaten sacs of vegetables. Their faces are scrunched, as if blinded by the sun overhead. Yifan is the third from the left in the back row, one arm slung around a shorter guy beside him, and his other hand rested gently on the shoulder of the girl sitting on a fold up chair in front of him.
He’s watching Luhan, but she doesn’t comment, doesn’t seem to dwell. “That’s...long past,” he says anyway. “She died from leukemia.”
Luhan looks up, but Yifan’s looking down now, finger on the photo.
“She died, and a while after I left this guy here died too from a car crash. This girl here and this guy got married.”
Luhan turns away, her lips sealed tight. She picks up her chopsticks again, but it’s as if she’d forgotten their purpose, staring at the piece of pepper she still hasn’t eaten as if she couldn’t recognize what it is.
He watches her secretly, waiting.
“Are you curious?”
“No,” she says. Her eyes don’t stray, not once, from the pepper.
4.
The week before Luhan turns 34, Yifan’s mother comes to visit. She brings the kids some professionally wrapped presents and watches with him from the couch as they fight over whose is bigger. “Yifan, you know, women get a little difficult to deal with when they’re in their mid thirties,” she says regretfully. He chuckles a little, ready to open his mouth to assure her when she turns away suddenly, and a manicured hand with blood red nails and wrinkling skin flies to her mouth.
“Yifan, I’m sorry, child, I’m so sorry.”
She looks off into the distance, eyes clouded with some revelation, like its just hit her after fifteen years what they’d done, meanwhile during this time telephone lines had been stretched, color TV was invented, internet came into existence. She observes it now happening all round her with an abashed apology on her mouth, hung comically open in horror. He lets her cry. She starts wailing on the couch, so loud that the kids from the kitchen hear and rush over, and he has to herd them into his study and type in the password for them so they can use the computer. He closes the door on his way out, and his mother’s still crying when he’s back. Yifan stands on the edge of the carpet, a sea of red dividing the two of them as if he can’t bear to take a step closer.
“Don’t say this now, mom.”
She chokes on her tears, and sobs even harder. Her snot is falling, and she’s desperately trying to block it with her wrists. Near Yifan, on Luhan’s little boudoir is a box of tissues, but he watches his mother stuff her snot back into her nose and suddenly feels a wondrous detachment, like he’d lost his limbs, and the only thing he can do is watch until she’s destroyed the sleeves of her shirt and seen herself out the door.
That night, with the kids put into bed and Luhan lying under the covers, Yifan goes to shower, and he stays with the water on his back and fist against the wall for a long time, trying to drown out every thought. When he comes back the kitchen light is on. He finds Luhan with her back turned, straight as always, pretty shoulder blades jutting out from the thin straps of her tank top. She hears the drag of his slippers on the tiles and spins around, glass of something alcoholic in her hand. “What’s the matter?” He says softly. She drinks the rest of the glass, sighs from deep in her lungs, and puts the cup in the sink. He watches approach and tentatively stop in front of him.
Slowly, Luhan brushes a hand down the side of Yifan’s arm, trails it up and down again. He watches her back, tensing and wondering, amazed. He picks her up by the waist, and with her legs around him he carries her backwards into their bedroom. He traps her against his chest and the wall, both of them breathing quick and shallow. “I want to touch you-”
“Why?” He closes his eyes, leaning their foreheads together.
“It’s been...a while…” She doesn’t say more. He understands. They fumble over the bed, shedding layers, and Luhan looks salacious with her short hair tossed, wet strands still knit from the shower. She grips his broad shoulders like a safety handle, and sits, not a heartbeat wasted, waving her waist with a fervor he doesn’t remember. She’s not the girl she was at 18 anymore, it’s painfully clear. The youthful dexterity and grace had gone from her body. It hurts him to hear her breathless panting so soon, when the even sheets below them haven’t warmed.
Yifan takes her air, puts her on her front against the bed, and fucks her roughly with an arm wrapped around her thin waist. It’s the first time he lets himself think about how attractive Luhan’s always been, how endearing, and in another life, if he was given the chance, all the things he might have done to court her, all the happiness he would have felt mumbling lines in an attic, all the Gods he would have thanked to be here right now. He wonders if in that world she would feel the same.
Luhan climaxes with Yifan’s tongue on her and her trembling thighs pressed wide open by his large hands. He lies back down beside her, both of them panting roughly in the dark.
“Thank you,” she whispers. All his dreams dissipate.
5.
When their youngest son turns 12 in the last year of elementary school, the grad class is sent off to a four day camping trip to a ranch in the countryside, and on the day of the return Luhan waits in her wine colored goose down jacket at 5:30 in the morning with the sun barely up, blowing into her hands. The parking lot is decked with a sparse smattering of parents waiting for the headlights of the bus to break into the horizon, all antsy on their feet. Luhan leans against a beam with her hands stuck in her pockets, absentmindedly watching the orange of the sunrise.
Somewhere ahead, a car pulls in. She watches a young man climb out of the driver’s seat, shutting the dashboard light. The stuffed dice hanging from his rearview mirror swings as the door slams. He looks around, noticing the families waiting engaged in their own hushed conversations. Luhan isn’t paying attention when he walks close enough for her to hear.
“Sorry to bother you, Miss, when is the pickup time again?”
Luhan looks over. The boy is incredibly young, sporting hoodie in soft grey, lighter than the asphalt, with the name of his university embroidered over his chest. He’s tall, his legs sculpted and long in his blue jeans. Up close, his hair is bleached blond, silvery blond, pushed back and out, then tucked in behind his ears. Pink seeps under his pale skin, in his cheeks, ears and nose. He’s got eyes like slices of honeydew, curled prettily from the smile on his thin lips. For the briefest moment, Luhan is simultaneously bewitched and enthralled by the fleeting thought that he is what she had been years ago, but it passes before a second thought. “Six o’clock, in twenty minutes.”
“Thank you so much,” he breathes, eyes thinning when his smile stretches. He stands with his back straight, not at all afraid of the morning chill, tapping his foot and humming to himself. But Luhan feels from within her core that he’s watching her discreetly, some feeling beyond intuition. She chances looking over, and finds his eyes on her. He smiles when they meet.
“Who are you here for?” She says.
“Ah, Wu Yixun,” he says, and Luhan’s heart skips a beat. He senses her alarm, and runs a hand through his cotton hair, all the way to the back of his neck. “It’s, it’s a Korean name.” He pronounces the name again, this time in his native tongue, and Luhan is entranced by the strangeness of the syllables.
“I’m Oh Sehun, his brother.” Sehun holds out his broad hand.
Luhan looks at it, clenching her own hand in her pocket before pulling it out quickly and shaking it. Sehun’s hand isn’t cold or warm, but it has a quality of softness. “I’m Wu Yeran’s mother, Luhan. Nice to meet you.”
6.
They’re standing in front of the doorway of the Oh’s’ household, parents behind the kid with his mittened finger on the doorbell. The door opens to the gentle face of a woman Luhan has met a few times before, smiling in a way she’s used to, with the same sweet eyes as her son. “Ah, the whole family’s here.” She chuckles with a naturally soft voice, and it comes out bubbling. “Come in, come on in.”
Mrs. Oh moves out of the doorway, and Yeran greets her “Hello auntie” before stepping in and shucking his shoes. How are you, sweetie? Good, auntie. Luhan unbuckles her Mary Janes, and when she straightens she catches Sehun coming in from the kitchen. Her gaze lashes away from some kind of impulse she won’t let herself think about.
Yeran runs into Sehun’s legs, shouting his Chinese name ungracefully across the room. Sehun’s face melts when he picks the kid up by his armpits, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Luhan watches Sehun carry her son away, madly giggling, drumming his little woolen fists against the firm back in a white tee. Sehun sets him down at the stairs. “Go get ready for your sleepover, kid.”
The mother sits the two of them down at the dining table, promising some tea that she won’t allow them to reject. Around the rectangular thing, Yifan sits beside Luhan with his elbows propped, observing the warmth of the house with a trancelike serenity. Everything is in motion. The lamps in the corner stains the walls a marmalade yellow. A fireplace crackles, and beside the fireplace a grandfather clock rocks side to side with patience. The television set flashes soundlessly behind the fish tank, shape distorted by its convex glass belly, and a goldfish ambles about his little world. The pot on the stove whistles, and Mrs. Oh stands from her chair and picks it off the stovetop. Upstairs, children are running and shouting. Luhan wonders what Yifan feels in a space like this, a home so suffocatingly, but rightfully, blamelessly alive.
Sehun comes back a while after and pours himself a cup of tea. He sits on Luhan’s other side, around the corner at the short end of the table, and talks to Yifan as if they are colleagues. Luhan’s hands begin to quiver, and she puts the cup down and clenches her sweaty fists on her lap. Yifan leaves to the washroom, and once the door closes Luhan tries again to pick up her cup. She blows at the surface, then sips, and puts the cup back down. She crosses her arms on her lap, and stares off out into the dark beyond the kitchen window. Minutes pass, dreadful and dead quiet.
Gently, Sehun takes her hand under the table.
She jerks from shock, but she’s frozen in the loose grasp and doesn’t pull back. Her eyes snap to his, and everything she could’ve asked him or said to him is there on his face. There’s a conviction he wears that she’s shaken by, because she’s never seen that look on anyone before, not even when she was promised eternity during their vows. For a moment she thinks that it’s an illusion, that she only thinks she sees all these missing things in him because she told him about the missing things, inconceivably drunk, and at the time ineffably lonely. The first tidal wave that hits is regret, and then guilt, and when the bathroom door opens and she can suddenly feel her hand again, the shame.
Sehun lets go, but he must know he has rung the bell and cannot go back. It plagues her on the way home, in the car, in the house, in the shared bedroom, in the bathroom where she touches her own ageing face in the mirror as if it were a stranger’s skin, a stranger’s scar, a stranger’s wrinkles. Your smile looks beautiful, Mrs. Wu, Sehun tells her. Luhan smiles at herself and thinks she looks like a corpse.
7.
She shows up back at the house the next morning, ready to take her kid away, but nobody answers the doorbell. Luhan tries the knob and finds it unlocked.
“Hello?”
There’s no response. She walks into the house, shutting the door behind her. “Hello?”
There’s music coming from upstairs, and it stops a moment after she calls out for the third time. “Mrs. Wu?” Comes a muffled yell upstairs. Luhan heaves a sigh, relaxing her whole tensed up body, shaking her head. She climbs the stairs, lecture ready on her tongue when she walks into the only room with its door open and meets eyes with Sehun, hair and clothes a mess, climbing off of his bed in shock.
“Where’s...everybody else?”
Luhan stutters, quickly averting her eyes from Sehun, who’s currently clad in nothing but a tank and grey underwear. She feels overwhelmingly invasive being in his room, his space, that it almost translates to a sense of danger. There are books scattered on his mattress, and a pencil behind his ear. He is almost timid.
“Mom and Dad took the kids to breakfast, and then they were headed to the amusement park...they called Uncle Wu before they left, I thought he would have…”
Sehun grabs a pair of pants off the back of a chair, and he looks over at Luhan with a slight blush. Luhan quickly turns away while he dresses, gaze falling upon the corner of his work space-his desk is piled and disheveled, littered with loose pages of notes and books flattened at the spine. She walks up to it, and with a hand grazes over the pages of some opened college textbooks, tracing the lines of words there. There are brochures from school sports clubs, exams folded and tucked in folders. An agenda, filled almost to the brim with red ink, marks dates and hours and minutes of a life following the bells of a system whose sound Luhan has almost forgotten.
Behind her, Sehun notices how she stands, fascinated with this microcosm, and stops changing. He backs out of the shirt half pulled over his chest. Then, with silent steps, he walks up behind her, plasters his chest into her back, and brackets her with his arms propped on the edge of the table.
“Luhan.”
“Oh, we shouldn’t do this-”
He kisses the nape of her neck, where her short hair ends. She’s trying hard to hold her composure, but cannot suppress the bodily shudder that sends her spine rolling, and her back firmly into his warm chest. Luhan has her eyes closed, leaning away from where Sehun’s head hangs, breathing softly into the collar of her dress. Her skin flushes pink, and she smiles wryly, painfully at how out of control and ridiculous this had become. “I’m a mother.”
Sehun shakes his head, hair softly bouncing, and kisses her neck again. “Doesn’t matter.”
She laughs once, a little choked, throat a little dry. She doesn’t stop shaking her head as Sehun’s hands wrap around her, as his fingers drag over her cotton wrapped skin. “Luhan-” His hand reaches lower, until he is cupping the heat between her legs. Her head rolls right back onto his shoulder. “My sex has borne more than you can ever give me,” she whispers, voice on the verge of cracking, and she knows in this moment that she can’t win.
“It’s ok.”
Sehun presses his hand over her stomach, the hollows of her flower drum, where the absent beat of a child’s kicking feet and fumbling hands plays in the recess mapped out by the holy seal of his hand to the back of her spine. He undresses her while they stand there, nimble fingers of a craftsman unbuttoning his way down the center of her chest, until he slides the cotton down her shoulders and it piles like satin at her feet. He makes love to her on his desk, among his tumbling pen holders and textbooks where her flailing limbs swim, engulfed by the sea of knowledge. He fucks her on her side on the bed with a sore leg raised by a hand at the knee. He bends her in unimaginable ways, so far that she tears up at times from the stretch, but the sobs from her throat is her crying out, from discovering again the whole rusted breadth of her heart, as if she’s forgotten how it felt to be alive, how it felt not to be always bleeding.
Three weeks later, Luhan woke up with the terror of a shrieking bolt of lightning splitting right behind her eyes, bathed in her own sweat on their bed, and with a dead certainty that neither she nor anyone else could comprehend she announced to Wu Yifan she was pregnant.
8.
The memory Luhan takes to Hell with her is the one where, in the dark of night, before her own shaking figure she witnesses Yifan’s face come alive in the purest, most sacrosanct form of rapture, pause, and then as if suddenly understanding, collapses in on itself eternally, as if she can hear the gargantuan rumble of his bones crumbling into heaps of ash, as if she can smell the burn of his distant heart on fire.
9.
Yifan holds her hand through the delivery, they way he’s done it twice before.
There’s a baby. She lies in the crib, and she rolls around, and gurgles and burps and wets her diaper. Yifan rolls her around to sleep on her side, and pats her back and feeds her powder and washes her diapers. She looks like newborns do, like someone clawed into a batch of dough and drew a scrunched face. Yifan still doesn’t know whose she is. Luhan swore she won’t say. “You’d kill him. Or your dad will.” She’d said. What the fuck is gonna be the kid’s last name then? Her face was green, eyes downright dead. It’s going to be Wu.
Luhan hasn’t spoken since the delivery, not a word. Yifan was half expecting her to say “Thank you” again, but she was so worn out by the time the baby came out that she fainted before she could even see the child in the bloodied hands of the nurses. Yifan is the first to hold her, even though there is red hot blood erupting within him as he gently carries the bundle in the baby pink towel. She smiles, and she coos, and she curls her little hands just like any baby does. For the first two days Luhan sleeps, and Yifan holds the baby, begging Luhan to wake up, so lost from any sense of direction that he starts to go mad.
In the first few days of Luhan’s consciousness, she sits on their bed looking out the window. The digestive system in her shuts down, and once there are three days when she doesn’t go to the washroom, even if Yifan cooks and feeds her by the bed. It becomes quickly obvious that she’s not getting any less feeble, and on the 8th day a doctor comes and says she’s caught a bad fever. For a week Luhan slips in and out of consciousness, until she would wake to take some medicine and fall asleep again for days. Yifan father calls the best doctors from across the country, and they come bearing their own family recipes and medical instruments in suitcases. They poke and prod, but none of them can tell him what’s wrong with her. Luhan lies in their bed shedding herself, eyes closed firmly, mouth curving just the slightest as if caught in a sweet dream, where every ounce of weight tacked onto her flesh crumbles right off, until she is finally unrecognizable and free.
With a baby in his arms and two kids by his sides, Yifan watches Luhan evaporate before his eyes, and the light in his eyes slowly dies with her.
10.
He wakes up one night to find the other side of the bed empty.
Clambering, he finds the lights, slamming them on all the way to the kitchen where he finds her slumped on the cold tiled floor against the fridge, breathing shallowly. The moment he sees her he lets out a pathetic moan, hand over his eyes as if he is going to cry. She looks over, coughs a few times. “Sorry about this,” she croaks. “I was a little hungry.” Luhan tries to smile, but the face she ends up making has Yifan knitting his brows together. She tries to push herself off the floor, but collapses a few times. “No don’t, I can stand.”
She can’t, and they both know it. Yifan kneels to pick her up off the floor, and she’s too tired to push him away, eyes closing and head leaned against his shoulder.
He carries her bridal style, and she’s light as a feather. He can’t bear to look at her ribcage peeking out from the top of her collar. She hangs onto his neck like a holiday ornament hanging by the fireplace, a snowflake. Back in the room, he sets her down, and lies beside her. He turns off the light and listens to her frosty breath.
“You know, when I was born...I wasn’t meant to be named Luhan.”
Yifan turns his head, looks at her.
“My father told me that on the day I was born, he asked my mother for my name, and she said,” Luhan takes his hand, and in his palm traces two characters. “‘Luhan’. Han for cold, for winter.”
“My father thought it was too unlucky, so he made me the dawn instead. His little dawn. Now look at me, I’m gonna die from the cold.”
“Don’t say that. Please.”
Yifan remembers, the days spent in the hospital right before their first child was born, when Luhan lay on the cot and listened to him tell stories about almost anything. He had two older brothers, in a family with three generations of officials, he explained. His mother named him Yifan, thinking he would grow up just like any ordinary boy. When their first son was born, Luhan named him Yufan, rich and sophisticated, giggling to herself as if she thought he wouldn’t notice the little scheme. When their second child was born, Yifan named him after Luhan: Yeran, like the midnight burning, like the dawn.
“Did you ever feel for me?” She croaks.
“Will it make a difference now, if I said?”
“I guess not.”
Yifan’ eyes blur, so he shut them tight, shuts them so tight. Slowly he turns Luhan’s curled palm, and with a quivering finger sketches a character into her hand. Beside him, Luhan holds back a whimper, and Yifan’s own chattering teeth clench.
“Twenty years is a long time.”
Their fingers tangle, clutching inseparably, shaking together.
Thank you for being kind.
end.