bring your lamplight to my door

For this prompt game.

Thank you so much for the prompt, it was really fun to write! I've been blocked for days so this was perfect.

Because it's me, it's more than 500 words and also angsty af, I hope you're prepared.

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“Why do I even bother with you?” Lin Chen mutters under his breath, counting the faint, irregular heartbeats pulsing under his fingers. “Father said to only open the window for half an incense time twice a day, and have a brazier burning all the time. I specifically ordered the servants. And now you’ve somehow managed to bribe even the most serious of our disciples to keep your window open and you’ve made yourself sick again.”

“Black…mail,” a hoarse whisper corrects him from under the bandages.

“Blackmail the disciple!” Lin Chen repeats. “Even better! I should turn you out and make you descend the mountain by yourself. Never had such an unruly patient. Are you trying to make us get rid of you?”

“It's…impossible—” Painful coughs interrupt the barely understandable hiss— “to get rid of me. Like… a weed.”

Lin Chen snorts. “It would only take a flick of my fingers to pluck you out, in your state.”

“Yet you… won’t do it… will you?”

“Oh, do you think that’s because you manipulated me into liking you?” Lin Chen starts to unwind the bandages covering his patient’s left hand. “I’m a healer. I don’t harm my patients, even if they’re intent on harming themselves.”

“No… harm… in fresh air.”

To disprove his point, the patient falls into a coughing fit, each spasm wracking his too-thin frame as he struggles to breathe.

“Even blowing in your face could harm you right now,” Lin Chen sighs. “Guess I’m camping in your room again tonight. So you don’t blackmail someone to open the window again.”

And so he can listen to his patient’s breathing and make sure his heart doesn’t stop overnight. Our of professionalism, of course. His death would be a waste of some truly excellent work.

----

General Mei’s tent is kept warm to the point of discomfort, for those who come in from the freezing outside, but Lin Chen doesn’t bother removing his cloak before he kneels by the bed. With practiced ease, he slips his hand under the furs and finds his patient’s wrist.

The heartbeat is still there. Faint, jumping in fits and starts and sinking every day, but still there.

Mei Changsu’s face is paler than a cadaver’s, but he’s alive. For now.

These past few days, Lin Chen resents every time he’s made to leave. The main army under General Meng’s command just won a major victory, most likely one that will result in a peace treaty, and the injured are tricking in, but all Lin Chen wants is to sit here and feel this pulse.

He doesn’t remove his hand from Mei Changsu’s arm, wrapping it around the frail wrist instead. Mei Changsu’s eyes flutter open, and he looks around in confusion for a moment before settling on Lin Chen.

“What’s the situation?” he asks in a whisper.

A whisper is all he can manage now, in the rare moments when he’s lucid. At the sound, Feiliu sits up from where he curled up at the foot of the bed and looks between them with little interest.

“I don’t care about the situation,” Lin Chen spits out. “And you shouldn’t care about anything but resting.”

“What’s—cough—the situation,” Mei Changsu repeats stubbornly.

Lin Chen shakes his head.

“Victory!” Feiliu shouts, too loud, too bright. “Da-ge said: Victory!”

Mei Changsu’s breath hitches. “Meng-dage won the battle?”

“Ng!”

“Of course he did,” Lin Chen sighs bitterly. “With your battle plans and strategy, elaborated at the cost of your health. How could he do otherwise? What better legacy for General Lin Shu?”

Mei Changsu closes his eyes. “Lin Chen…”

He falls still. In a moment of panic, Lin Chen seeks his pulse again, almost sobbing when he finds the beat.

He’s been keeping the news of the victory from Mei Changsu for five days now, five days of fever and coughing and worsening condition, because he was afraid that Mei Changsu would hear it and decide that his job was done.

“Don’t worry,” Mei Changsu murmurs after a long while. “It’s impossible to get rid of me. I’m like a weed.”

“Changsu, this joke stopped being funny two years ago,” Lin Chen says. He’s glad that his friend’s eyes are closed, and that Feiliu is the only witness to his tears.

Mei Changsu shakes his head with a smile. “Like a weed,” he repeats. “I come back.”

Not from this. Mei Changsu took the last Bingxu pill three weeks ago. There is nothing left to sustain his body now. His death is as inevitable as the sun rising.

Using this database, you can access the names and biographical information of real people across Chinese historical periods and dynasties. You can go on here and find the names (not just given names but courtesy names and other sorts of honorary aliases, depending on the period) of thousands of real individuals, though it's almost entirely men in the older dynasties. Very few women.