Canon: Remove if not applicable.He is a teacher again, when he realizes, when he remembers.
He always remembers the same way, lonely in his bed even when he’s not alone, overtaken by the phantom pain of missing limbs and a broken heart.
It is overwhelming. It is the same, yet again.
He never expects anything different.
Except things turn out to be different, this time.
It was the middle of winter, this time. A biting cold winter. But Cambridge wasn’t the worst place for winter, and the café he had slipped into had some nice warm corner tables, and good tea. Hóngyán could still feel the phantom pain from that night, though he ignored it in favor of the article he’s reading on his computer. It was an interesting piece, published by one of his colleagues, and he wanted to finish it before he set out into the snow once more.
He ignored that he was being watched, too, at least for some time. But something at the back of his mind kept telling him that he needed to look up, that it was important that he look up, because if he didn’t nothing would ever be right again, and so he did look up.
A red gaze met his own, peering past the rim of a coffee cup and a pair of glasses, and Hóngyán was stuck in the man’s eyes.
A sharp face. Intelligent eyes. A muscular body. Red hair tied into a messy braid.
He wasn’t sure he had ever known how breathing was supposed to work.
Hóngyán never regretted the silence that passed between them, his own arched eyebrow at the other man’s careful smile.
When the phantom pain haunted him in this life, he slipped close to his firefighter, his former soldier, former politician, his lover, his heart, his husband, and the man would kiss him and pull him even closer and hor the first time since their souls tangled up with each other’s, he wasn’t filled with the same painful ache as he had dealt with for so many lifetimes.