The five-month mark did not arrive with a fanfare or a sudden burst of light. It crept in like a fog, thick and suffocating, settling over two very different locations where the memory of one boy acted as a gravity well, pulling everyone into its dark center.
In the quietest place of house, Han Ruyan sat on the edge of a bed that had long since grown cold. This was Shu Yao's room—a space that had become a museum of neglect. It was the room where everyone had walked away: a kind father, a caring sister, and ultimately, a mother whose love had been disguised as a frozen, sharpened blade.
The air in the room was stale, holding the ghostly scent of old books and lavender. On the nightstand sat a photo frame, the glass fractured down the middle like a lightning bolt. Through the cracks, the faces of Shu Yao and Qing Yue looked back, frozen in a moment of stolen happiness that now felt like a lifetime ago.
Juju, the small, observant cat, was curled at the foot of the bed. His green eyes were fixed on Han Ruyan, his tail flicking in a slow, mournful rhythm. He was the only one who still expected the door to open and a familiar, gentle hand to reach for him.
Han Ruyan's fingers trembled as she clutched a lace handkerchief, her shoulders haunched under the weight of a regret that had no expiration date. She looked at the cracked frame, and the dam finally broke.
"I wished I never left him," she whispered, her voice a jagged shard in the silence. "I wished I hadn't been so... so brittle."
Juju let out a soft, inquiring meow, standing up and padding toward her. He placed a small paw on her knee, sensing the miasma of grief that clung to her. Han Ruyan reached down, her hand shaking as she stroked the cat's head.
"You miss him too, don't you?"
The cat purred, but it was a hollow sound. Han Ruyan buried her face in her hands, her sobs finally escaping in wet, rhythmic gasps. She remembered the way she had looked at him—the coldness she had projected like armor.
"I wanted him to be strong," she choked out, talking to the empty air. "I shouted at him when he stood in the corners, quiet and small. I hated his kindness because I thought it was a weakness. I didn't want him to be taken by cruel hands... I didn't want the world to break a heart as soft as his."
She let out a bitter, self-loathing laugh. "So I broke it myself. I became the first cruel hand he ever knew."
Juju leapt into her lap, his warm weight a small comfort against her shivering frame. Han Ruyan clung to the animal, her tears soaking into his fur. She was a mother who had tried to build a soldier out of a poet, only to realize that the poet was the only one who had ever truly loved her.
Miles away, the ICU remained a sanctuary of sterile indifference.
The medical team moved with the practiced, detached efficiency of clockwork. They flipped on a penlight, the beam cutting through the gloom as they pried open Shu Yao's eyelids.
The pupils were dilated, red-rimmed and glassy, staring into a middle distance that no living person could see. They checked the muscle tone in his arms, looking for the slightest hint of resistance, the smallest twitch of a nerve.
There was nothing. His body was a stubborn vessel, anchored in the deep sea of the coma, refusing to surface.
Bai Qi stood in the hallway, his silhouette a dark, jagged line against the fluorescent lights.
He was clutching a fresh bouquet of red roses—blooms so vibrant they looked like open wounds against his pale skin.
He watched the doctors through the glass, his jaw clenched so tightly it felt as though his teeth might shatter.
When the lead physician stepped out, he didn't even have to speak. The slow, weary shake of the head was enough.
Bai Qi didn't offer a word of thanks or a question. He simply brushed past them, his presence a cold wind that silenced the nurses' chatter.
He entered the room and the door hissed shut, sealing him into the silence.
Shu Yao lay there, looking as peaceful as a saint carved from alabaster. Bai Qi approached the bed, the "Monarch" of the business world reduced to a man who lived and died by the rhythm of a ventilator.
"Shu Yao," he murmured, his voice cracking into a heartbreaking, crooked smile. "I brought you more. Fresh ones. The best in the city."
He moved to the vase, his fingers trembling as he discarded the slightly wilted blooms from the day before. He replaced them with the new roses, their aroma filling the small room until the scent of antiseptic was almost drowned out.
He took one single rose, a perfect, blood-red specimen, and sat on the edge of the mattress. With an agonizing gentleness, he lifted Shu Yao's hand. It was light—terrifyingly light—like the wing of a dead bird.
"Look how beautiful it is," Bai Qi whispered, his eyes bloodshot and glistening. "I'll help you hold it. You don't need to tire yourself out today. Just... just feel the petals."
He laced Shu Yao's fingers around the stem, his own hand covering the boy's, but Shu Yao's grip remained a hollow fiction. There was no response. No flicker of the pulse, no shift in the breathing.
The reality of the fifth month hit Bai Qi with the force of a physical blow. He dropped his head onto the mattress beside Shu Yao's hand, his eyes squeezing shut as the tremors began.
"I'm afraid, Shu Yao," he confessed into the linen, his voice a broken thread. "The nightmares... they're getting louder. I can't sleep without you. I can't think. The world is a loud noise and I'm just... I'm I am trapped."
He looked up, his face a map of devastation. He wanted Shu Yao to save him. He wanted the boy who had once forgiven his every sin to reach out and pull him from the wreckage of his own mind.
But Shu Yao was finished. He had spent his entire life saving the people who hurt him, and now, his spirit was simply too tired to carry the weight of Bai Qi's salvation.
"Are you listening?" Bai Qi squeezed the limp hand, his voice rising in a desperate, pleading pitch. "You won't abandon me here. You wouldn't leave me in this misery by myself. You're too kind... you've always been too kind."
The only answer was the steady, clinical beep of the heart monitor.
Bai Qi shivered, his entire frame racked with a visceral, silent sob. He took Shu Yao's hand and pressed it against his own forehead, as if he could absorb the boy's stillness, or perhaps, offer up his own life in a trade the universe refused to make.
The obsidian towers of Rothenberg Industries stood as monuments to logic, profit, and cold, unyielding efficiency.
But inside the glass-walled offices, the machinery of the empire was grinding against the grit of human grief.
The fifth month was not just a passage of time; it was a weight that pulled at the marrow of every man who had ever claimed to care for Shu Yao.
In his private office, Charles sat before a triptych of monitors. The blue light washed over his face, highlighting the sharp, jagged lines of a fatigue that sleep could no longer touch. He was ostensibly finishing the quarterly projections, but his eyes were fixed on a different set of data—a digital excavation of the months he had spent away from China.
He clicked through a file, his hand clenching the mouse so tightly that the plastic groaned.
"He won't open his eyes" he whispered into the empty, air-conditioned silence.
The words felt like ash in his mouth. Charles turned his head sharply, staring out at the skyline of the city he had once conquered. Now, it felt like a cage.
"I shouldn't have left," he hissed, his voice an incendiary rasp. "I never should have crossed that ocean."
He realized now, with the devastating clarity of hindsight, that leaving China had been a death sentence for Shu Yao's peace. While Charles had been serving his loyalty abroad, Shu Yao had been slowly dismantled by the Rothenberg machine. Charles began to pull up encrypted reports, searching for every shard of evidence—every slight, every bruise, every hidden humiliation that Shu Yao had endured while Charles wasn't there.
He was no longer just a businessman; he was a scavenger of sins. He worked less on the company and more on the past, meticulously reconstructing the timeline of Shu Yao's suffering. Every report he read was a fresh wound.
"I will find everyone who touched you," Charles promised the ghost in his mind.
Down the hall, in a boardroom that smelled of expensive leather and stale coffee, George sat at the head of a mahogany table. A junior worker was droning on about market shares and logistical overhead, but George didn't hear a syllable.
The sound of the executive's voice was replaced by a visceral, high-pitched ringing in George's ears.
Every time he closed his eyes, the same image flickered across his retinas like a jagged film reel: Shu Yao, collapsing. He remembered the way the boy's body had convulsed—a delicate frame racked by the violent rejection of his own blood.
He remembered the copper scent of vomit and the way the light had seemed to drain out of those soft brown eyes in real-time.
George placed a trembling hand on his temple, his fingers digging into the skin.
It's been almost half a year, he thought, a wave of nausea rolling through him.
He tried to maintain his professional facade, his face a mask of practiced indifference, but the maintenance was failing. He was the one who had been there. He was the one who had seen the victimhood of Shu Yao unfolding like a slow-motion tragedy.
If we talk about sins, George mused, his gaze drifting to the empty chair beside him, mine are the heaviest. I was the one who could have been stubborn. I was the one who could have reached out and dragged him out of that misery.
He remembered looking into Shu Yao's eyes—those forgiving, luminous eyes that never held a drop of malice, even for the man who was destroying him.
He felt a sharp, localized pain in his chest—not of jealousy, but of a profound, agonizing injustice. Shu Yao's heart was too pure for the world he inhabited. It was a heart that was too stubborn to let go of Bai Qi, even when Bai Qi was the very hand that was suffocating him.
George looked at the space beside him, imagining a reality where he had been stronger. In that world, Shu Yao would be sitting there, perhaps smiling at a joke, his breath warm and steady.
"I could have protected you," George thought, his jaw tightening until it ached. "I should have taken you away from his sight. I should have been the monster you needed to save you from the monster you loved."
Instead, he was here. In a meeting about money, while the boy he loved was a pale statue in a room full of dying roses.
And at The hospital room was a study in stillness, a tableau of a love that arrived too late to be anything but a burden. Bai Qi had finally succumbed to the gravity of his own exhaustion. His head rested heavily against the edge of the mattress, his cheek pressed against the sterile linen.
Even in the depths of a fitful, nightmare-ridden sleep, his fingers remained locked with Shu Yao's—a desperate, clawing anchor that refused to let the boy drift any further into the mist.
But while the body remained in the room, the soul was elsewhere.
Inside the vault of the coma, there was no sound. No beep of monitors, no rustle of silk, no scent of dying roses.
Shu Yao was suspended in a world of infinite ink. It was not a dream, but a purgatory—a vast, lightless ocean where the water was made of silence and the air was made of forgetting. He didn't remember the hospital. He didn't remember the poisoning.
He was a ghost in his own mind, huddled in a dark corner of a dimension that had no walls.
Far, far above him, a single point of light flickered. It was a pale, shimmering needle of gold, as distant as a dying star in a different galaxy. It was the world of the living—the world of breath and pain and the scent of fresh Rose's.
Shu Yao looked up at it, his eyes wide and hollow.
"It's... it's too far," he whispered.