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English
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Published:
2025-05-13
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1,275
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1/1
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said it was the settled destiny

Summary:

What she does dare to say: “what are the best parts, then?” with the memory of strong tea and a soft, gentle voice, kindness like no one else at the school ever showed her. A memory of resentment-filled shrieking at his passiveness, his non-confrontational nature, lingers alongside it.

 


“You’d know all about them,” Shao Yuanyuan says, a flick of her hand emphasizing the words. “Wouldn’t you?”

 


“Yes,” Wang Qing says, distantly disappointed, “I would.”

or: priorities, and things left unsaid.

Notes:

title from to my first by nct dream; absolutely does not match tonally but. shrugs. banishes this from the drafts; the insanity i feel over them because of kavi ao3 user lanternglass is real and was only slightly derailed because of yana toboso (blue memory arc. in short.) anyway throws this at you and goes. have fun.

actually edits this to go: pspspsps at all of u like cats. come join the link click exchange ehehe :)

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

It’s the signs of life that she leaves behind that lingers on Wang Qing’s skin, rather than any memento or note.

Take this, for example: Shao Yuanyuan leaves a note on her pillow, and Wang Qing takes a moment to contemplate; and then throws it in the trash. Not exactly unwelcome, but not unexpected, either.

Or: cleaning up her bedroom and finding strands of impossibly long dark hair scattered about on the floor. A pause to stare and wonder: it’s been three days, and I didn’t see this, did I? 

A hand to her own hair, tied back in a severe bun, and then, a brisk movement of the vacuum cleaner, and up the filter goes the remnants of life Shao Yuanyuan leaves behind, like a consequence of dipping her toes into the ripples of time.

She thinks about Cheng Weimin and reflects: well, it’s no wonder he’d married a woman like that.



There are consequences to time travel, Shao Yuanyuan tells her, and Wang Qing, still a bit wide-eyed, still a bit star-struck, still as skeptical, asks her, what are the consequences you’ve reaped for your time traveling? 

Shao Yuanyuan laughs and taps Wang Qing’s nose with her finger. Don’t worry about me. I can handle what they throw at me.

Wang Qing doesn’t ask if that’s why she’s been diving back in time over and over to save her husband. Simply leans back and assesses the playful tilt to her mouth and shine to her eyes, overlaid with a tiredness that’s been on her face near-constantly since the first time they met.

The first time they met: Shao Yuanyuan travel-weary and exhausted but eyes burning with an intense fire, Wang Qing shaking with the remnants of a blaze and a bandage around her head, pinning her sweat-soaked—and dried—blonde hair uncomfortably to her scalp; shaking with shreds of terror and a resolve to take the limelight as the one survivor. 

A promise: if you meet him in the future, create an opportunity for me to see him. It’s a promise Wang Qing intends to keep, regardless of what it may cost. Spending time around Shao Yuanyuan comes with the cost of too much information, see.

They don’t talk about it. Once, Wang Qing asks, “don’t you miss your son?” It’s an easier question to ask than, why are you trying to save your husband who left you and your child? Of course, it’s more complicated than that, it always is. Reasons upon reasons, stacked up and piled up; she plays it off as putting what she’s learning in class to good use. Never says: tell me something about you that’s real.

She doesn’t expect a sincere reaction from Shao Yuanyuan, but she does go still at the careless laugh accompanied by, “I miss him every day. He’s a fiery one, you know? Takes after me in all the ways he probably shouldn’t—but he has all the best parts of his father. Brat of a kid, that one,” and the reckless, careless smile she wears is tinged with sadness Wang Qing dares not touch. 

What she does dare to say: “what are the best parts, then?” with the memory of strong tea and a soft, gentle voice, kindness like no one else at the school ever showed her. A memory of resentment-filled shrieking at his passiveness, his non-confrontational nature, lingers alongside it. 

“You’d know all about them,” Shao Yuanyuan says, a flick of her hand emphasizing the words. “Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Wang Qing says, distantly disappointed, “I would.”



It’s not that they’d made any promises between them beyond the promise to connect her to her son one day, Wang Qing knows that. It’s not that either of them expect anything beyond their agreement, beyond the hospitality Wang Qing unfailingly offers her when she surfaces from the sea of time, calling her by a name she’d left behind in the fires of Bahati. 

It’s that—it’s that Wang Qing builds up her reputation, socializes as well as she studies, indulges in a few flings here and there and shows up the next morning impeccably put-together to pass an exam with flying colors. She’s a noted student. By the time she begins her thesis, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that she’ll become accomplished and sought-after in the field of psychology.

It’s that she still sleeps fitfully and wakes with unbearably vicious heat licking at the edges of her dream, and had gotten a little too used to, at one time, finding Shao Yuanyuan next to her. She rationalizes: of course it’s natural to dream of the fire with Shao Yuanyuan nearby, she’s irreversibly connected to the memory. Cheng Weimin’s wife. 

Cheng Weimin’s wife, who’s five steps from destroying herself in order to save him, no matter what it takes; even at the cost of their son growing up lonely and left behind. (Wang Qing wonders what kind of kid he is; she may be a decade older, but loneliness, being singled out for a difference—she knows the pain acutely.)

The first time they’d kissed and stumbled into bed together, Wang Qing had flushed red, losing her composure, and said, you’re married. Shao Yuanyuan had sighed, shrugged, and said, I’m married to someone who left me behind, to die, with our child. Another thing Wang Qing had not pointed out were the contradictions and hypocrisies in there. 

Shao Yuanyuan is brilliant, a firecracker of a woman. Loud and shameless and undeterred by anything; time-looping in her grief; so, so kind, and so full of love. Weighed down by hard decisions that she bears on her shoulders with more endurance than Atlas. A mess of grief and sheer willpowered-resolve. 

It only makes sense that Wang Qing finds herself following the shape of her body hidden in large coats, hair swishing with the movement, as she crosses rooms and claps her hands together, disappearing in an instant. It only makes sense that she’s compelling to someone like herself.

She never asks, when will you be back, only asks, what do you need done? Because this is what it is: a mutually beneficial exchange. Shao Yuanyuan will go on time-looping until she breaks free of whichever time node keeps causing her to fail, and Wang Qing will put her energy into becoming a psychologist of renown. Works to make sure that Chris Wang is stronger and more impenetrable than the girl thrown against bathroom sinks.

It boils down to this: all they have between them is stolen moments of time. The days when Shao Yuanyuan drops by and Wang Qing serves her tea the way her husband used to make it and maybe (sometimes—often) fall into bed in a tangle of limbs and heat won’t last forever. Or perhaps it will, and she won’t know it. Time becomes so easily complicated.



She tells Cheng Xiaoshi—impatient, bursting at the seams, unable to sit still—the story she’s concocted and perfected over the years, and stills at the answer he gives, a memory of a man long-gone transposed over the nineteen-year-old boy that sits before her and earnestly says, maybe it was no one at all. Shocks her into movement when he brings up the name.

Clicks the camera, and thinks: someone like this could only be Shao Yuanyuan and Cheng Weimin’s son.

(In the aftermath, chest heaving and stumbling over Vein’s cold body (throwing a pitying glance at the boy who’d inherited all the shamelessness of his mother, and the kindness of his father) and bruised-up like Chris Wang never allows herself to be, a notebook clutched to her chest: a promise is a promise. )

Notes:

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