Every frame of their story was steeped in April's gentle light. At seventeen, Jiang Qu turned around beneath a shower of cherry blossoms, blood welling on the back of his hand more vivid than the petals. Through that thin pink haze, Xia Mufan saw the shape of all the longing that would fill the next six years of his life.
In time, the years pressed them into two faded specimens: one was a school uniform button Xia Mufan kept in an iron box, its edges oxidized to a bitter tea-brown; the other was the cherry blossom brooch Jiang Qu always wore on his white coat, its petals gleaming with the cold hardness of medical-grade stainless steel.
In those years, Xia Mufan used a small knife in the art studio to prove he existed, blood beading on his wrist and drying into scabs. Jiang Qu drew more than a thousand cherry blossoms in his medical records, pressing his pen so hard it tore the paper, as if dissecting a wound within himself that had never healed.
Six years later, the hospital's fluorescent lights turned their reunion into a slow clinical operation. A hereditary prophecy flowed through Xia Mufan's veins, while Jiang Qu's stethoscope finally heard the long-hidden, deafening silence.
At three in the morning, in a hospital room, the glucose in the IV line dripped for the hundred and thirty-seventh time. Their eyes once again reflected each other's faces: memories of disinfectant, bergamot, and rust, like two ancient porcelain vessels in need of repair gently touching in the dark, making a whole broken sound that only the two of them could hear.
It turned out every separation was a long consultation, and loving each other meant finally handing over the blood test report for the wound they had suffered at seventeen. At life's most fragile point, they understood the gentle yet stubborn diagnosis the other had hidden for half a lifetime.
Theme: Love and the future.
