I Think I Hauve Tianhuo

It happened so fast that Kuafu didn't know what was going on until it was over. He and Yi were just trying to test his cable system for distributing energy from the rhizomatic columns on a scale bigger than a table model. It shouldn't have been dangerous. One moment he was saying, "Alright, powering on," and pulling the lever to divert power, the next moment the rhizomatic column shuddered and Yi was shouting, "KUAFU—!" and the moment after that—

Kuafu stared up at the lab's ceiling, breathing heavily. He felt winded. The air smelled of ozone. Events registered retroactively. Yi had tackled him to the floor just as a fuse blew and glass shattered. That explained the warm weight on top of Kuafu's body now—must be Yi.

...Wait, fuck—!

"Yi!" Kuafu blurted out, scrambling up onto his elbows and then his palms. Yi was breathing, he could feel that even before he saw it, but he lay curled up shivering on top of Kuafu. He didn't sit up on his own. Kuafu had to manhandle him upright. His eyes were glassy and unseeing. A thin cut along his cheek dribbled blood down to his jaw, staining his white fur pink-red in its path, and Kuafu thought he could see other slices through Yi's robes where something cut through the fabric and into the skin of his arms. Shit, the glass— "Yi, are you alright?!"

It took a beat for Yi to answer, too slowly, "Yes. I'm fine."

"Are you sure?!" Kuafu unthinkingly reached for Yi's face, holding his chin still with one hand while he thumbed at the cut. It—it wasn't too deep. Thank Fusang. If glass going at that velocity had gone closer to the back of Yi's skull, to his neck and his brainstem—well it was Yi, so probably Kuafu would have dragged him to the nearest outgrowth of Fusang in their area and waited anxiously for the roots to spit him back out good as new. Still! Yi had admitted he still felt all of the pain when things like this happened. It wasn’t okay just because he would get back up afterwards!

…Speaking of getting up, Yi was being entirely too docile about being manhandled. He normally would have swatted Kuafu away before Kuafu even managed to get a hand on him, if he thought fussing was imminent. Kuafu jostled him, gently. Yi startled a little and blinked at him as though he'd zoned out. Yi was usually scary-efficient at dealing with crises. He shouldn't be this—this still and quiet. And he was still trembling, like he was cold, when the lab was hot enough to be uncomfortable. "Hm?"

"I don't think you are fine," Kuafu grumbled. He shifted Yi off his body and struggled to his feet before crouching to haul Yi up by an arm. Yi overbalanced and staggered against him. Another bad sign. "We're going to Eigong."

"No," Yi said, abruptly, shaking his head as though clearing it. He managed a stubborn glare that Kuafu was annoyed to find reassuring. "No, we're not. I'm fine. Just—" He stopped, glancing down at himself as though only now self-assessing. "—A few cuts. I just need to use my medicinal pipe. Nothing to bother Eigong with.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Kuafu grumbled. Was he really supposed to believe just a few cuts had left Yi so shaken? He glanced over at the control panel for the columns. No current. Even so, just to be safe, he yanked the lever back down to the ‘off’ position. Could he climb back into his hover chair? Probably shouldn’t. It was probably best to carefully check the cushion for glass shards first. He would have to walk. “Fine. Let’s go over where the glass didn’t reach and get you healed up before anything else.”

“We should prioritize cleaning up,” Yi objected, eyes scanning the room. “The shrapnel—”

“Yi,” Kuafu warned. He didn’t want to treat Yi like a child, but— “We’ll clean up when you’re not actively bleeding. You can sit down and heal up, or I can call Eigong and tell her there was a lab accident and you’re refusing medical care.”

Yi scowled even harder. He turned on his heel and strode for the entrance of the lab. Kuafu almost held his breath. Storming out, or—? No, okay, thank the heavens, he was just going for his bag with the medicinal pipe stashed inside. He glared at Kuafu again as he opened the reservoir and tipped in an elixir.

“Thank you,” Kuafu said, weakly, as Yi activated the pipe and took a puff off it. Usually he would have asked Yi to step outside the lab, first. Firstly, though, he was the one asking Yi to heal up, and he knew nagging would only get him reminded of that; secondly, bloody cuts aside, Yi looked ragged and shaken, and Kuafu wanted him tended to as soon as possible; and lastly, well. It wasn’t like there was anything left in the lab to explode a second time if the pipe sparked.

Yi didn’t snap at him, at least. He only found a spot shielded from shrapnel by the angles of the walls and sank down to sit on a table top, still puffing on his pipe, feet propped on a nearby chair. Kuafu carefully crossed the floor, wary of glass shards, to come stand over him.

“I told you you should wear shoes around the lab even if you usually use your hover chair,” Yi said. “It only takes one accident.”

“Don’t ‘it only takes one accident’ me, you’re the one who got hit by flying glass and then tried to refuse to heal up,” Kuafu huffed. Yi grimaced at him. Kuafu’s gaze strayed back to the shattered model rhizomatic column. “…Lab accident, huh. Should I file a formal report with the University’s safety office, you think, or…?”

Yi snorted. “Do you ever want to be allowed to test a model rhizomatic column indoors again?”

Kuafu was sure the answer to that would be ‘yes,’ in an hour or so, but admittedly, he felt less certain of it when Yi was currently curled in on himself on a tabletop, nursing cuts that almost certainly would have been Kuafu’s to bear, instead, if Yi hadn’t tackled him down. Kuafu’s experiment had done that to him. What the hell was he doing? Nothing he put power into on this scale should be so volatile it exploded like this. He didn’t deserve to be on the Tiendao Council if his work was this sloppy, if it brought him that close to injuring his dearest friend. “Mngh.”

Yi glanced up at him, brows arched. “You’d prefer you were testing it outdoors and all of that shrapnel flew off to get lost in the dirt and grass, where it cuts up little woodland animals instead of—?”

“Alright, alright!” Kuafu groaned. Little woodland animals. Yi knew exactly how to get under his skin. Now he couldn’t stop picturing some poor little rabbit cutting its paws open on a stray scrap of metal. “I… I’ll design shielding to go between the column and the control panel, at least. And you have to stay behind it with me if you’re going to be here for testing!”

Yi shrugged. “Okay. No complaints here.”

Kuafu’s shoulders slumped. He had sort of hoped Yi would be so huffy and prideful that being told to stand behind shielding like some mere mortal would put him off. Kuafu wasn’t sure he wanted Yi around for testing, anymore. If his models were this volatile—if he might hurt Yi—

“Quit making that face,” Yi said. He took one last puff on the pipe before deactivating it. “I don’t blame you, you know. We’re the first people to try harnessing rhizomatic energy at this scale in hundreds of years. Of course sometimes things will go wrong. Once the lab isn’t covered in little bits of glass anymore, we’ll sit down and go over your schematics again, see what might’ve caused problems.”

He sounded so—so damn matter-of-fact, like it was just sensible. Like it was silly that Kuafu felt panicked about the layer of glass dust on every surface and the smell of burnt circuitry in the air and the barely-healed cut on Yi’s cheek, the freshness of the wound inescapable in the smudge of blood in white fur. Kuafu bristled. It would have been annoying anyway, but after Kuafu had had to halfway shake Yi awake because he’d been so rattled—! Fusang, he could really be infuriating sometimes.

He was startled when Yi added after a few moments of hesitation, voice soft in a way Kuafu rarely heard from him, “When I got the rhizomatic stabilizer, it was from an accident like that."

"...Was it?" Kuafu asked, cautiously, irritation deflating. Yi had never volunteered anything about the incident that led to the miracle of biomedical engineering embedded in his chest, before. Kuafu had assumed that meant it was a sensitive topic, which… the current context certainly supported.

"I was testing the prototype of the Nymph." Yi smiled, tiny and bitter. He was no longer meeting Kuafu’s eyes. "Heng tried to tell me something was wrong, but I didn't listen to her. So I powered it on, and..."

"...And it exploded," Kuafu finished, finding his voice had lowered to meet Yi's.

"And I covered Heng from the blast." Yi palmed his own chest absentmindedly, hand flat to the fabric covering the skin and metal over his heart. Kuafu's stomach churned with nausea. He didn't need Yi to be any more explicit, did he? It was almost an identical parallel. He'd pushed Kuafu out of the way. They had gotten insanely lucky. If Kuafu had actually been in the line of fire for anything more serious—it could have been even more similar. Yi hadn’t gone still and quiet because he’d been hurt, he’d gone still and quiet because… “So—like I said. Quit making that face. You could have fucked up much worse. These things happen, and we pick up and move on with what we learned from it. This wasn’t so bad, in the grand scheme of—”

“Stop,” Kuafu protested, voice hoarse with the effort to stop himself from tearing up. “Hang on, you can’t just… are you okay? I didn’t think—I’m freaking out, and I don’t have any past trauma to—”

“‘Trauma’?” Yi echoed, hackles rising. “It’s not—!”

“Oh, shut up.” Kuafu ruffled his own ears, anxious energy surging again. “What the hell is this? Why would you tell me that and then immediately try to downplay it? Do you really think I'd judge you for freaking out for a minute after you did something dangerous trying to save my skin?"

Yi scowled at him, eyes re-focusing on Kuafu's face. "I didn't freak out. I was telling you about it because you were panicking, and I thought some commiseration might help you calm down.”

Ugh. Of course Yi would be like this about it. Kuafu rubbed at his temples with an exasperated sigh. “Yi, you were barely with me for a minute there. I—I thought you were hurt worse than I could see.”

“I’m not,” Yi tried to interrupt. “I’m f—”

“Yes, yes, and I’m glad, but I’m not thrilled that apparently you were mentally back at the time you almost died as a child, instead—” Yi's jaw clenched, the only tell that he'd been caught. “—And you’re trying to convince me that’s no big deal!”

“Died,” Yi corrected. Kuafu stopped and stared. “Not almost died. I was dead, technically. My heart stopped.”

For Fusang’s sake—! Kuafu spluttered, “That’s not better!”

“I wasn’t awake that much longer. Really, if we’re talking about trauma, Heng had it worse than me.”

“I—first of all, it’s not a ‘winner takes all’ situation, okay, you can both have trauma! And second of all, what you just effectively told me is that you were awake for some amount of time after the explosion that almost—that killed you!” Kuafu sucked in a deep breath, then made himself exhale it steadily instead of shouting in Yi’s stupid, stubborn face. After another deep breath in, he said, “Tell me what you need.”

It was Yi’s turn to stare at him.

“Tell me what you need. To stop shaking.” Yi immediately went stock-still. Kuafu clarified, through gritted teeth, “In a way that isn’t just locking down all of your muscles and probably revving up your nervous system even worse.”

“You’re fussing over nothing.”

“I’m fussing because you’re my friend and you won’t admit you just had a post-traumatic stress response to me almost blowing us both up with a badly-engineered rhizomatic energy column!”

“It wasn’t badly-engineered,” Yi said, looking mysteriously offended. “You’re the most competent engineer I know.”

…He was offended on Kuafu’s behalf? That was almost sweet—not the time. “Don’t deflect! That’s not the point and you know it.”

“I didn’t have a post-traumatic stress anything.”

“Fine,” Kuafu said, impatiently. “You don’t have post-traumatic stress disorder, you don’t have trauma, you weren’t freaking out, whatever you say. Tell me what you need to stop shaking.”

“I’m not—”

“We can move on to cleaning up the glass after you tell me.”

Yi’s jaw snapped closed. He glared at Kuafu for a long moment. Kuafu glowered back, crossing his arms. After a long enough stretch that Kuafu was starting to wonder if Yi might manage to force him to back down—because, really, he did need to clean up all the damn glass, he couldn’t stand around scowling at each other forever—Yi finally admitted, almost inaudibly, “Sit down for a minute.”

What? Kuafu didn’t say, because he was positive every syllable he made Yi communicate was another chance for him to talk himself out of cooperating. Instead he promptly sat on the edge of the table, beside Yi, and looked to Yi with raised eyebrows to cue further instruction.

“Just… stay there. Don’t talk.”

Kuafu nodded. He sat, quietly. The shivers got worse, first, as Yi stopped repressing them; Kuafu held his tongue. Yi’s arms wrapped around himself. He took a deep, slightly-wheezing breath, then another. He wasn’t looking at Kuafu. He wasn’t even sharing a glancing touch with Kuafu. But he had asked Kuafu to sit here, so… maybe just Kuafu’s presence was enough to reassure.

“It’s quiet,” Yi got out, after another minute of heavy breathing. Kuafu hummed in acknowledgement, loathe to disrupt said quiet if it was helpful to Yi. “It—wasn’t. Afterwards.”

“Yeah?” Kuafu whispered. He could imagine it, sort of—Heng must have been bawling, and then Yi would have been conscious next—Fusang, he hoped Yi wasn’t conscious again until the hospital, where there would have been machines and doctors at all times, and heaven forbid Kuafu imagined the amount of commotion when Eigong was attempting to implement an entirely novel medical device in Yi’s chest…

“Was weeks before I got any quiet again.”

Even making a sound of acknowledgement seemed inappropriate, after a confession like that. Kuafu hesitantly moved his leg to bump his ankle against Yi’s. Yi didn’t flinch. A tiny, tight smile crossed his lips, if only briefly. He left his ankle pressed to Kuafu’s.

It was another few minutes until Yi suddenly let out one last shuddering breath, grip around his own middle easing. Kuafu watched him roll his shoulders as though shaking himself out.

“Feel a little better?” he asked, still softly.

“I was fine,” Yi muttered, although in Kuafu’s professional Yi-wrangling opinion, it sounded half-hearted. “You got your way, so we’d better start cleaning up now.”

“Okay,” Kuafu said, agreeably. What tension was left in Yi’s shoulders faded at the easy concession. Yi hopped down from the table.

“Tell me you have emergency shoes somewhere in here, at least.”

“Yes, yes,” Kuafu grumbled, shuffling past Yi to get into the tiny coat closet by the lab’s entrance. “I have some house slippers.”

“I meant real shoes,” Yi said, with much more long-suffering than Kuafu thought he deserved, given he’d just been so resistant to taking five minutes to accommodate his own trauma response. “Although I suppose I’m grateful you have anything.”

“Well, help me sweep up all the damn glass and then you can order me ‘real’ shoes off the net while I’m staring at the rhizomatic column blueprints.”

“Fine,” Yi said.

They got the lab cleaned up. Yi ordered him shoes and found the miscalculated variable on the blueprints. In a few days, when Kuafu finished up the revisions and repairs, the next test-run didn’t explode.