Work Text:
Count your blessings, they say, as if that would take long at all.
In his life, Lu Guang counts two.
One: he has a photography-related time-travel ability and somehow ended up working at a photo studio.
Two: said photography-related time-travel ability can be easily monetized.
Other than that, his life is pretty shit.
He’s not supposed to be the one that complains.
Ever since he moved in with Cheng Xiaoshi, he’s the one who stays quiet while the other mopes and gripes about increasing rent prices, he’s the one who recieves stingy customers with a steady voice while Cheng Xiaoshi fumes in the darkroom, and he’s the one who silently takes the blame for Qiao Ling’s broken dishes when she spots the shards piled neatly in the trash.
Qiao Ling, despite the various glass-breaking incidents she thinks Lu Guang is responsible for, appreciates this about him.
She constantly compares the two of them, pulling no punches in the big-sister manner she berates Cheng Xiaoshi for his immaturity. As if she controls the economy! Doesn’t he know the price of everything is rising?!
So, yes, on the surface, Lu Guang is the calm one. The rational one, the responsible one; the one that won’t waste his time grumbling about circumstances outside of his control.
Even his mild temperment has a limit though, which he’s pretty sure was reached, oh, ten-or-so years ago?
It’s hard to keep track of time when he keeps jumping back like this, but he’s pretty sure it’s been at least a decade or two. All things considered, he thinks he’s doing pretty good.
At least, he doesn’t feel like he’s changed that much, and there’s yet to be a timeline where Qiao Ling or Cheng Xiaoshi ask hey, you’ve been acting strange—are you sure you’re actually Lu Guang?
—so, yeah, he’s doing fine.
Probably.
But on some days, he’ll crack an egg too hard and leak yolk all over the counter even though he knew this would happen since that’s what happened last time, or walk straight to an empty construction site because oh, that restaurant doesn’t exist yet, or swing open a door expecting a shout of his name only to be met with silence, since right, he hadn’t gone back yet, oops, better do that now.
Can anyone fault him if he’s been more on edge recently?
He blinks open his eyes to dazzling rays streaming through flipped blinds and a face looming over his.
“Lu Guaaaang! It’s not like you to oversleep! Come on, you’re first on shift today—”
A hand grabs at his pillow, successfully displacing it from under his head. Lu Guang reaches for it, using it to cover his face as fists thud playfully against the soft fabric.
No matter how hard he tries, the thin barrier fails to block out the sound of Cheng Xiaoshi’s hiccupping laughter—bright as the sun and light as a feather, as if everything is right with the world, as if this is how things ought to be.
This fucking sucks.
A speeding car, a break-in. An accident on the subway, a gas leak. The days tick back and forth like a metronome.
Cheng Xiaoshi always dies around mid-September. Never before the 10th, but never after the 20th. It takes a while for Lu Guang to establish this, and he’s always on the guard for an exception, but so far, it seems as if the node has—a range, of sorts. Ten days.
If Cheng Xiaoshi makes it past September 20th, he’ll be safe.
This becomes Lu Guang’s goal, because it’s awfully hard to remain focused without one. He tries not to think about all the other factors that might be at work, how absolutely ludicrous it is for a death node of all things to have some sort of Best By Date.
12th. 16th. 10th. 18th. 13th.
Then—
Lu Guang wakes up on September 21st to a call requesting ransom for a hostage. He can hear screaming in the background.
Thick with blood, raspy from strain; as warped as it is, he can barely recognize Cheng Xiaoshi’s voice.
He hangs up before the bang of a bullet fully registers through the line.
Past the 21st. He just has to get past the 21st.
Cheng Xiaoshi’s death occurring in September means that Lu Guang has seen enough Mid-Autumn Festival preparations for a lifetime.
Just like Cheng Xiaoshi’s death, the holiday’s date also fluctuates, and if he was first-timeline Lu Guang he could probably spin some flowery poetry about it.
Of course, first-timeline Lu Guang wouldn’t even know about Cheng Xiaoshi’s death, would only regard the event as a future, transient idea, and would not startle at the pop of fireworks and think he was hearing the sound of another failed attempt.
Present-timeline Lu Guang takes a deep breath and calms himself, because that’s foolish, Cheng Xiaoshi has never died the same way twice in a row, and he’s right there on the waters, anyways, to get a close-up of the show from one of the launch boats, and Lu Guang watches as another firework flies upward and a spark strays downward and the river bursts into flame.
Lu Guang is listlessly scrolling on his phone, keeping an eye out for any news about faulty subway cars or hit-and-runs or local fires, when he stumbles across a quote on a self-help influencer’s page.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
Okay, well. Fuck you too.
He’s feeling particularly vindictive today, against—the world, perhaps. He’s on attempt number forty-or-so, and has recently realized he doesn’t remember what it felt like to not know of Cheng Xiaoshi’s death.
Surely, way back in that first timeline, he’d had thoughts of a future beyond September. Plans for the studio, plans for when they finally paid back all the debt. Lu Guang was fastidious by nature; there’s no way he hadn’t once drafted up a five, ten-year plan and gone over it step-by-step with Cheng Xiaoshi.
Surely.
A sharp pain ignites in his head.
This has been happening more lately, too. Whenever he tries to think more than a few dives back, he gets splitting migraines, like some sort of physiological anti-cheat system.
And it appears his luck today is abysmal, even by his standards, because at that very moment Cheng Xiaoshi himself barges in through the front door and comes striding over, plopping down so close besides Lu Guang on the couch it’s as if he’s making room for five others.
“Lu Guang! Help me come up with a statement for next year!”
The words “next year” trigger some discomfort in his chest, and he turns his head to the side a bit sharply.
“…For?”
“The studio! It’s a new publicity thing, the town’s gonna showcase all its small businesses and they need a statement from us.”
Ah. Last time, this had taken place in the spring. They’d failed to hand in anything on time, and got a generic description plastered beneath some photos that had been ripped straight from their social media.
For whatever reason, it seems like Cheng Xiaoshi is a little bit more responsible in this timeline.
A little bit, but not a lot, on account of how said man is leaning up against him at the moment, shoving a paper onto his lap, eyes wide and expectant.
“Help me,” in true Cheng Xiaoshi fashion, actually means “the job’s all yours!”
“There’s not a moment that goes by without me thinking about your death.”
Lu Guang thinks about saying this, right then and there.
He thinks about what the other’s reaction might be.
The idea is just barely amusing, somehow, and it seems like it’s taken only forty-or-so jumps for his sense of humor to somehow get worse.
He’s been staring at Cheng Xiaoshi for a beat too long now, he knows. He’d better look away before the other’s face turns into something horrible, like in his dreams when it starts unfurling at the edges like a sheet of paper-mâché.
Something halfway between a laugh and a cough wrangles its way out of his chest, and he picks the paper up, smoothing it out on the table and diligently writing down some bullshit about photos and souvenirs and memories. Cheng Xiaoshi somehow likes it, that sentimental fool, and talks excitedly about framing the article when it comes out, making room for it on their photo wall.
Lu Guang almost smiles, then remembers he’ll never see it published, anyways.
Today is September 9th.
In less than twelve days from now, there is a one-hundred-percent chance that Cheng Xiaoshi will be lying on the ground somewhere, bleeding out from a stab wound; hit by a car, flung across the pavement like a ragdoll; slumped over on the couch, grasping at his chest as he suffers a heart attack; stuck inside a flaming warehouse, burning to a crisp.
He hands the paper back to Cheng Xiaoshi before excusing himself to the bathroom to throw up.
This really, truly, sucks.
It’s unfair of him to think this way, Lu Guang muses to himself on day T-minus-six, lounging on the couch. He’s pretending to read a book while discreetly watching Cheng Xiaoshi play on his phone out of the corner of his eye, just in case he decides to spontaneously combust or something.
It’s rather easy, at this point, for him to adopt a “woe-is-me” attitude. But really, it’s time for a reality-check.
After all, it’s not like he’s the one who’s dying in every timeline.
If anything, Cheng Xiaoshi is the one that has super shitty luck. To have his death written into a node at the tender age of twenty-one? He must have done something absolutely egregious in his past life, pissed off a god or something. He certainly would have the audacity to do that.
Because—even disregarding the fact that Cheng Xiaoshi seems incapable of not dying in a supremely horrific manner, it isn’t like he’s had a good life, either.
The two of them aren’t in the habit of discussing their pasts with one another, but through all these years Lu Guang has pretty much pieced together a rough picture.
Abandoned when he was young by parents that never came back, going through the critical years of adolescence bitter and alone. According to Qiao Ling, he stayed this way pretty much until high school, despite her best efforts.
It was around the time of their first basketball game when Cheng Xiaoshi began to get out of his bubble more, began to try. After that, with his inviting personality and warm heart, his social circle expanded rapidly, until now it felt like every couple of days he was going out with a group of friends.
Now he seems happy, most of the time; so transparent in his emotions that it’s hard to believe he could hold onto any negative thoughts for long.
And yet, at night, Lu Guang is the only one who hears him toss and turn as he struggles to sleep.
The only one to hold him as he breaks down after another tough dive.
The only one who sees how his eyes glaze over at random moments throughout the day, as he gets stuck in another memory that isn’t his.
Cheng Xiaoshi only awakened to his own time-travel ability after meeting Lu Guang.
On some days, the guilt weighs on Lu Guang so heavily he can barely get out of bed. Can barely make it down the stairs. Can barely lift his head to reply when Cheng Xiaoshi cracks a joke about how tired he looks.
But Lu Guang is a pro at faking, has done it for so long, and eventually he’ll get his shit together and be able to make it through the day while pretending he isn’t the devil that cast a curse on sweet, unsuspecting Cheng Xiaoshi, turning his pure heart into a source of pain.
Sometime shortly after Lu Guang loses track of what number attempt he’s on, he sets aside some time to just—think.
Yes, he knows he probably should’ve done this a while back, but days really fly by when they, well, don’t.
He had been thinking, in the beginning, but then he started overthinking and it became a hindrance to his ability to act, so then he stopped thinking and started just acting, and then it took another couple jumps or so for him to realize that all this was rather counterproductive.
Because—the fact that their abilities exist. The fact that nodes exist. This also implies the existence of rules, of universal laws, that these concepts must abide by. Such as—
A node cannot be changed after it’s created.
This is a fact. How Lu Guang knows this, he has no idea, but that’s much less important than the realization that he’s absolutely certain this statement is true.
Lu Guang has always taken this rule to mean that Cheng Xiaoshi’s death cannot be prevented once it happens. That the creation of the node and its moment of occurrence are one and the same.
But.
That doesn’t really make sense, does it?
It’s circular logic.
The moment of creation could very well be far earlier.
I have to go back further, he thinks—
—and then realizes he’s already given up on saving Cheng Xiaoshi this time.
Today, it’s September 12th.
Today, Cheng Xiaoshi dies.
Alarmingly, Lu Guang doesn’t even know how it happens.
He wakes up, gets out of bed, and then suddenly there’s blood on his hands and he’s sitting in the hallway of a hospital, breathing hard like he’d just run a marathon.
There’s footsteps fast approaching him, and he looks up to see Qiao Ling, still in her nightgown, tears streaming down her cheeks and hands grabbing onto him in a panic. She collapses on the ground, frantically trying to speak but sobbing too hard to even take a full breath.
He leans down to help her up on reflex. She looks up, and he recoils. Her face is peeling off, like a sticker. A large chunk of her cheek has fallen away entirely, revealing the stark-white bone underneath.
The door next to them opens. A doctor comes out with a clipboard. His face is peeling too, but less like a sticker and more like a scratched-off lottery ticket.
Through his somber tone and Qiao Ling’s ear-splitting scream, the first thing Lu Guang thinks is she wasn’t this loud last time.
The second: I’m losing my mind.
This is his limit, it seems. Lights flash by and rain pounds on windshields and his vision is shuttering, the sounds of traffic fading in and out; it’s as if his entire person is cracking, breaking, crystalizing into shimmering fractals of red green yellow on the blood-streaked roads.
Again—
Lu Guang stares down at his hands, washed clean of blood. But his shirt is still soaked with it, a splash of red on white, and the metallic scent lingers heavily in the air.
Outside the window, a streak of light beams upward through the open air. The first firework of the night bursts into flame and rains down in a spray of shooting stars. A second soon follows. It’s midnight.
There’s a photograph in front of him. The one he took, that very first day in that very first world, when he spotted a head of messy black hair and a smiling face and couldn’t help but be drawn to the court where laughter rang out like sparks in the sky.
Count your blessings. One, two—
Lu Guang knows he has a third blessing in his life.
A blessing in the shape of an angel who wears a basketball hoop as a halo and invites him to play a game in every timeline.
Whether it was fate or luck that pushed them together that day is of little importance. He thinks about the—many years, now—he’s spent by Cheng Xiaoshi’s side, the moments in-between that shine brightly even through the knowledge of what is to come.
It’s enough. It’s more than anything he could’ve ever wished for.
The solution to—everything, really, seems so simple now, and his mouth almost curls into a smile at the bitter hilarity of it all.
At how he didn’t realize it sooner.
Cheng Xiaoshi only awakened to his ability after meeting me.
A node cannot be changed after it’s created.
Lu Guang had been granted a blessing, and it was Cheng Xiaoshi who had to pay the price.
He knows exactly what to do.
A long, long time ago, Lu Guang had promised himself this was the one photo he’d never touch. It was from too far back, the stakes were too high—who knows what he might mess up if he used it? With so many unpredictable variables, any chance of success was entirely unknown.
He had kept it with him, though, throughout everything. As a source of motivation, he’d told himself, but perhaps he’s always known it would come down to this.
He’s already broken too many promises to count; what’s one more?
It was time to go back.
Back to the very beginning.