The bed welcomed him like a lie told gently.
Shu Yao sank into it—face pressed to pillow, limbs heavy with the kind of fatigue that sleep alone cannot touch. His body slackened, surrendered to gravity, to breath, to the ache of existing.
And for a moment, he floated.
Twenty minutes passed.
Maybe less.
But time is a trickster in grief—stretching, curling, doubling back like a ribbon caught in wind. What mattered wasn't how long he slept.
It was what followed.
The nightmare came not like thunder but like perfume—sweet, familiar, and wrong. It slipped in through the cracks of his stillness, curled around his ribs, and whispered lies in voices he loved.
Qing Yue was laughing.
Her voice, bright like windchimes in sun, danced through a garden that wasn't theirs. She stood beside Bai Qi, hands folded behind her back, eyes shining like she had secrets that bloomed instead of burned.
Bai Qi was smiling.
Not the sharp, sardonic grin he wore at work—but something soft, tender. The kind of smile Shu Yao had never received. The kind that hurt to witness.
They were together.
Their arms brushed.
Their eyes met.
Their world shimmered in golden peace—a peace he wasn't invited to.
And Shu Yao stood there, barefoot in the dream, wearing nothing but bruises the dream gave no name to. Invisible to them. Unnoticed.
Not a friend. Not a brother. Not a shadow.
Just absent.
Then—like glass snapping beneath his skin—the garden twisted.
Sunlight dimmed into streetlight.
And suddenly, he wasn't watching them anymore.
He was beneath someone.
A breath against his neck. Hands—those cursed hands—tight and unforgiving. A mouth murmuring cruelty disguised as intimacy. The scent of sweat, fear, and asphalt rose around him, and Shu Yao clawed for air that wasn't there.
"No," he tried to say.
But the word was stolen—sucked from his throat by the dream's hungry mouth.
He heard Qing Yue again—laughing.
He heard Bai Qi, calling someone's name.
But not his.
And he cried out.
Not for help.
Not because he thought anyone would hear.
But because there are screams that don't belong to the body—they belong to the soul, and it must throw them somewhere or else combust.
---
He awoke choking.
Breath strangled in his throat, sweat dampening his collar, tears drying along his lashes like salt burned into glass.
His fingers clutched the sheets—white knuckled, trembling, terrified.
The room was dim, safe, his own.
But the ghost of that dream still breathed in the corners.
It had felt real.
Too real.
Qing Yue's laughter still rang in his ears, a cruel melody played over violation.
And Bai Qi's face—serene, unknowing, elsewhere—felt like the worst betrayal of all.
Because in that dream, Shu Yao was broken.
And no one saw.
Just as he rose—slowly, like a man peeling himself from a grave—Shu Yao sat at the edge of the bed, spine bent beneath an invisible weight. His breath trembled in the hush, not from cold but from something colder. The kind of chill that doesn't touch the skin, only the soul.
He stared ahead, but the dark gave no answers.
Sleep, once a balm, had become a battlefield. No longer did dreams cradle him—they crushed him. Every time his eyes closed, the world twisted crueler. The moment his mind drifted, the shadows sharpened their teeth.
He did not feel tired.
He felt hunted.
The room was quiet, but silence had its own noise—like static behind the walls, like the breath of things unspoken. The nightmare had left its fingerprints all over him, and now, the bed felt like a trapdoor.
He would not lie down again.
What was the point, when slumber only led him to horrors stitched together by memory and fear? Qing Yue's laugh still rang like a blade behind his ear. Bai Qi's absence echoed deeper than any scream. And that touch—that ghost of a touch—clung to his skin like oil.
So he rose.
His body was still, but his mind trembled—like porcelain after an earthquake, outwardly whole, inwardly cracked.
He padded across the room on bare feet, as if moving might dislodge the nightmare from his spine. The moonlight fractured across the floor, pale and broken, like the pieces of himself he didn't know how to gather anymore.
Sleep had betrayed him.
And now, even rest had become a cruel lie he no longer dared to believe in.
Since sleep refused him—spat him out like something soured—Shu Yao moved with hollow purpose. With fingers that trembled only slightly, he undid the buttons of his suit, peeling it from his frame like a second skin that no longer belonged to him.
The bathroom greeted him with sterile silence. He twisted the tap until the water screamed to life, a silver ribbon spilling from the faucet, relentless and cold. As he stepped under it, the cascade crashed down his spine—like rain in a cemetery, cleansing nothing.
He scrubbed.
Not gently. Not thoughtfully. He scrubbed like a man trying to erase his own existence.
The bruises were painted across him in unholy colors—lavender blooming into rot, ochre kissed by violence. His ribs, hips, chest—each a chapter in a story he did not choose to write. The others he could hide with fabric and silence.
But his lower lip—
That was the cruel sonnet. Split slightly, swollen just so—like a secret whispered too loudly.
A poem no one read right.
Especially not Bai Qi, who had laughed—laughed—and teased, as if Shu Yao had chosen this. As if he'd entertained some faceless girl, some shameful fiction conjured in Bai Qi's head.
The thought made his stomach curdle.
He looked at his reflection for only a breath—then looked away.
Because even in the mirror, he couldn't meet his own eyes. Not when they asked questions he couldn't answer. Not when the boy staring back looked like a stranger made of salt and suffering.
So he rubbed harder.
The soap became a lather, the lather became a war. His fingers blurred across his skin, trying to scrub the bruises into myth, into vapor, into nothing.
But the water could only wash so deep.
And some things—some memories—were inked into the soul.
Shu Yao stepped out of the bathroom like a ghost that had wrung itself through storm and steel. The steam curled around his ankles like reluctant lovers, unwilling to let him go. His skin, pale and soaked, clung tight to bone—sharp clavicles jutting like wings clipped too early, ribs drawn beneath the surface like a cage made for grief.
He didn't bother with a towel. Only silence wrapped around him.
From the armoire, he retrieved his pajamas—not soft, not warm, but familiar. He wore them not for rest. Sleep, that traitor, had long abandoned him. It was simply routine—a hollow echo of a life once lived on steadier ground. The silk shirt draped over him like a whisper, sleeves hanging from wrists that had learned the weight of trembling too well.
The exhaustion wasn't loud—it was ancient. The kind that sat in your bones like rust. The kind that didn't yawn or stretch but coiled, deep and quiet, like the bottom of a well no one remembered digging.
He collapsed into bed again—not with the ease of surrender, but with the dignity of a ruined cathedral bowing to rain. Limbs folding, not quite trusting the sheets to catch him.
Then, almost out of instinct, he reached for his phone.
The glow lit his face in faint sorrow. He didn't know what he was searching for—answers, distraction, someone to tell him it hadn't all happened the way it did. His thumb hovered over the screen like a priest unsure of prayer, as if the right words might rise from the glass like a spell.
But the silence remained.
Digital or otherwise, the world offered no balm.
Still, he scrolled—tired eyes flickering in the pale light, skin humming faintly with the sting of too much scrubbing. Searching not for something new… but for something that would let him feel less.
His thumb lingered above the search bar, trembling just slightly—like a violin string pulled too tight. And then, he typed.
Sleeping pills.
Not melatonin, not tea, not tricks with lavender and breathing. No, not anymore. He needed something with weight. Something that could drag him down like an anchor in a stormless sea, tether him beneath the surface so he wouldn't keep bobbing up to choke on his own breath and memory.
The results appeared, cold and efficient: rows of boxes, milligrams and brand names, warnings typed like whispers in parentheses. He skimmed through them not as a patient, but as a man measuring escape routes.
Sleep was supposed to be a mercy—but for him, it was a bloodthirsty kingdom where nightmares ruled in velvet robes and laughter came from walls that bled. Every time he closed his eyes, he returned to those realms of unholy cruelty: where hands took without kindness, and voices he once trusted twisted into blades.
He didn't want to dream. Not again. Not like that.
Maybe—if the pills worked—he wouldn't wake up mid-torture. Maybe his body would stay limp through it all, brain drugged into apathy, and those dream-things could scream and claw and he'd feel nothing. Nothing at all.
God, that sounded like heaven.
He tapped one of the links, heart numbing with the strange resolve of someone who's stopped fearing the void and started inviting it in. His thoughts blurred, dull and slow like snowfall over a grave.
If he didn't sleep properly soon, he would become a ghost in skin—a hollow mannequin dressed in routine, walking through life with the eyes of the long-dead.
The irony didn't escape him.
He didn't want to die.
He just wanted sleep without battle.
And if it took a little poison in a velvet bottle, so be it.
Again, sleep began to court him—not like a lover, but like an undertaker in silk gloves. His eyelids grew heavy, not with drowsiness but with the quiet burden of too many unspoken things.
He hadn't eaten.
He hadn't spoken to his mother.
Only Qing Yue had seen him—and even then, he'd only whispered, "I'm tired," like one confesses a sin to the wind.
Not tired from errands.
Not tired from work.
But tired from living.
And Bai Qi… Bai Qi lived in the locked chamber of Shu Yao's ribs like a forbidden language, a secret script carved into bone that he never dared recite aloud. It hurt—God, it hurt—to love someone who offered laughter to the world like rain in summer but gave him nothing but drought.
Kindness was currency Shu Yao had long run out of. He craved it with the ache of someone parched and kneeling before a mirage, knowing the water isn't real, and begging anyway.
He told no one.
Not a soul.
But tonight, the silence whispered truths too sharp to ignore.
"You don't deserve peace."
"You don't deserve warmth."
"You don't deserve to be saved."
That voice—soft as moth wings, cruel as a noose—wrapped around him as he lay on his back like a stitched-up doll, tears blooming without permission. They slid down the alabaster slope of his cheeks, glistening like candlewax on porcelain.
His breathing hitched. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just… fragile.
A cracked inhale,
A trembling exhale,
And yet, no complaint.
Because he had learned—somewhere along the line—that suffering in silence is what beautiful boys like him were made for.
And so, with a heart cracked down the middle like a porcelain teacup no one bothered to glue back, Shu Yao—threadbare, hollowed-out, quietly breaking—drifted into a sleep not granted but stolen. A forbidden slumber. The kind that wraps around you not to soothe, but to drown.
His cheeks were still wet, salted trails painting constellations only sorrow could chart. The tears hadn't dried—no, they clung to his skin like they belonged there, like they were born from him and had no wish to leave.
He'd forgotten to close the curtains. But somehow, that mistake became a small, silver mercy. The moonlight poured in unabashed, slipping across the room like a ghost lover, illuminating the boy folded in on himself like a letter no one had opened. His bed—a makeshift altar to exhaustion—held him in the quiet devotion of cotton and grief.
And the moon, pale and unblinking, bore witness.
To the bruises—emotional, invisible, blooming beneath the surface like violets drowned in milk.
To the silence—thick, molasses-like, wrapping his breath until even his pain forgot how to speak.
To the beauty—aching, raw, terrible—in a boy who never asked for anything except not to feel like this.
He slept with his back to the world.
And the world, cruel and glittering, moved on.
But in this hour—in this breathless, silver-stained frame—Shu Yao's suffering became art.
Not a single soul saw it.
And yet, if gods were watching, surely they wept.
For a boy made of quiet hurt and aching grace,
Who never begged for warmth,
But deserved to be held.