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What he remembered was a loud crack followed by a black well of pain.
Hands all over him. The smell of distress.
Memory itself fading, despite his struggle to stay awake, to stay with…
…and then no memory at all.
—
He woke in an undignified prone position, head resting on someone’s thigh, hands bound behind his back. The thigh he was resting on was very warm and still, a good place for his head, actually, which ached badly.
“Are you with me now?” A man’s voice, low and serious. He opened his eyes, but it was impossibly dark.
“I think so. I’m awake.”
The man let out a deep breath, not bothering to hide his relief. “Xiao Bai, don’t fall asleep again. It’s been about eighteen hours since they took us and you’ve been out this whole time.”
He took note of his surname as though it were new new information. Bai. No, he definitely hadn’t hadn’t known that moments ago, and he couldn’t recall his given name. Bai-something. With a strangely mild curiosity, he tried to think of other information anyone should know—his birthday, his age, where he lived, whether he had a job. But the information, if it existed in his mind, was invisible to him. All he knew was what he’d learned since waking up, half his name and the fact that one person cared about him. Too overwhelmed to be properly worried, he decided to deal with it all later. “That long?” No wonder he felt so awful. “Where are we? Why am I handcuffed?”
The man moved a little. A clinking came from behind him. So he was handcuffed as well. “Do you remember surveilling the smugglers? No? I need to see that concussion. They found us and we couldn’t fight our way out. Then you got clipped on the head and they took us here. It’s a basement in a house in the Market District,” he added.
“Oh.” He lived an exciting life. Then, shamefully late, it occurred to him to ask, “You’re okay?”
“Yes. Just a few cuts and bruises. How’s your head?”
“Hurts, but I’ll survive.” Realizing the question had probably been a hint to get off the man’s leg and support his own weight, he carefully levered himself up to sitting. It took some effort, but the man awkwardly supported him, despite having arms cuffed behind him too.
Upright now, he finally took notice of the concrete floor and cold air. “Someone left the air conditioner on.”
In response, the man scooted over close to him, thigh to thigh, shoulder and side pressed firmly against his. He tilted his head as though inviting him to warm his face at his neck. It was very tempting. This man smelled good.
“I’m afraid it’s been like this all day. I’ve been leeching your body heat this entire time.” He had a nice voice, deep and serious at its base, but familiar and ironic in the way he addressed him. When he didn’t take the man up on the offer to snuggle his neck, the man leaned his own head on his shoulder.
He was still doing the math on that when the unmistakable sound of a lock turning came from what must be the other end of the room. A ceiling light came on, flickering like in a horror movie, and as his new friend tensed and lifted his head, he got his first view of him. He was handsome, with perhaps the most lucid eyes he could imagine ever seeing, trained darkly on the door. He added intelligence to the little bag of personal qualities he was collecting about the man. He had a sharp haircut with his hair buzzed at the sides and in soft waves above, tousled now. He wore a good suit that had lost its jacket and gotten wrinkled during their adventure. A professional of some sort. He wanted to look down and see if his own clothes were as good, but his eyes caught on a deep blackening bruise high up on the man’s cheek.
The evidence of the man’s vulnerability sat heavily in his heart, more so than perhaps it should have given their short acquaintance. Then again, this man was the only person in the world he knew. In any case, no one should be punching him.
The door swung open and two men entered, walked over, and looked down at them. One asked, “Which one?”
He and the man answered at the same time: “Me.”
But the man shoved himself forward quicker than he could and that made the difference. They grabbed the man and pushed him ahead of them out the room. The door was closed, the lock engaged, and he was alone before he had time to draw breath to yell.
That he didn’t even have a name to yell, something to call the man, made him want to punch things. It was the first strong emotion he’d felt since waking up, and it was not pleasant. He forced himself to stand, making heavy use of the wall at his back, and paced carefully back and forth until he could balance without risk. Then he dislocated a thumb and slipped that hand out of the handcuffs. The pain of setting the thumb back in place added to the lingering pain of his concussion to result in a bout of nausea. When that passed, he tried the door and found it solidly locked.
So he crouched next to it, waiting.
How he knew how to escape handcuffs and lie in wait to ambush people, he didn’t know. What he did know was that that guy had taken care of him. He called him Xiao Bai and used his shoulder as a head rest, and he had gone quietly away with bad men for reasons that could not be very good at all.
After a long time, footsteps approached and the door was unlocked and opened. He let the two thugs enter. They carried his friend between them by the upper arms, his hands still cuffed behind his back, body limp. They had their backs to him and carried no weapons. If he could keep them from using the man against him, he might have a chance.
He started by using the advantage of surprise and the momentum of a running start to dislocate the knee of one of his opponents. They both dropped the man they were carrying, one to fall screaming to the ground himself, the other to spin and go after him. He spared a second to aim a roundhouse kick at the downed man’s head, knocking him out, then gave in to what turned out to be the very familiar rhythms of hand-to-hand combat.
The fight was not short. He was repressing the pain of the concussion, but the injury itself threw off his balance and reaction time. Frustratingly, his opponent kept meeting each punch and kick and throwing equally powerful but insufficient blows back at him. They were too evenly matched. Just as he began to doubt his chances of winning, a body streaked into their arena and tackled his opponent to the floor, out of nowhere. It was of course his friend, the worse for wear but helping anyway. That he would wake up and rush to do that wasn’t surprising, but something lifted in him to see it.
He bent to help hold the struggling man down, then decided to simplify things and sucker-punched him with force, knocking him out.
As soon as the body beneath him went limp, his friend fell back and lay panting. Fresh blood dribbled a steady trickle down from his nose, smeared from the fight. He was also soaking wet from the top of his head to his midriff.
Why on earth…? The puzzle slowly and horrifically came together for him, though, and his mouth dropped open. Across from him, the man finally caught his breath and lifted his head. Reddened, hazy eyes looked fiercely back into his, challenging, and whatever words he’d been about to say didn’t come out after all. The man clearly didn’t wish to discuss it.
Why? he wondered. What made a good person like this so stoic?
Instead of talking, he knelt down and carefully helped the man move to the wall and settle there. Water transferred onto his shirt—it turned out he was wearing a suit after all, white pants, white dress shirt, black tie, his jacket lost somewhere—but he ignored it. The man accepted his help easily, leaning back against the wall. But there was something calculating in his gaze.
There were so many things he wasn’t thinking or talking about, especially for someone with no memory, that he gave himself permission to wonder about that sharp attention later. He had the urge to rub the man’s shoulders, but it seemed ridiculously intimate and less helpful than finding some way to release his arms.
“Hold on, I’ll find the keys,” he said, and left his side to rummage through the downed men's pockets. When he came back with the key, his friend sat up to give him access to his wrists. To his dismay, the skin around them was more deeply abraded than his own, as though he’d strained against the metal despite it digging in so far. He avoided touching it as he removed the cuffs, threw them well off to the side when they were free.
At a sharp groan from the man, he put his hands on his biceps and helped him move his arms slowly back into place. The man was really messed up. But he smiled and asked hoarsely, “You finally got to dislocate your thumb? How long have you been waiting to do that?”
Having no idea, he said, “Cross it off the bucket list.”
“Heaven help us if you ever get to the rest of that list. Are you okay, Xiao Bai?”
He was still assessing the man and not liking what he saw. His hair was a mess and dripping over his face and shoulders, bangs slicked above red-rimmed eyes. A trickle of blood was still coming down from his nose, and the bruise below his eye was still a dark gray, edging on black. He was soaked down to his midriff, and of course there were the messed up shoulders and wrists.
“You really need a hospital.”
The man sighed and closed his eyes. “We both do. Get one of their phones and call the team? There’s no one else here; we should be okay for a bit.” Then he coughed, wetly. It sounded like it hurt.
Unnerved, he was digging through the men’s pockets again before realizing he had no idea who “the team” was or how to call them. Faced with admitting the thing he wasn’t thinking about yet versus finding another way to get help, he handed the phone he found to the man and said, “Um, one too many punches to the head. Can’t remember the number.”
At the wide-eyed stare he received, he felt instantly guilty. He hadn’t meant to worry him. “It’ll come back. Just, you know, better call the team first.”
“Right.” The man’s reddened eyes stayed on his face while he dialed by touch. It was such a cool move that he instantly wanted to try it himself. That or reach out and touch the man, get their skin in contact. Who was this guy, he wondered? Everything the man did made him admire him more, and physically, he felt… a sort of fire when he looked at him or thought about him, even after such little time. He knew half his own name, that one person cared about him, and that he needed to stay by this man’s side. But what if the team came and they had to go their separate ways?
Suddenly, it became important to know more about who they were, how they knew each other, and how they could stay together. But the need to be with him aside, he wouldn’t be able to do anything before knowing the man’s injuries had been treated and he was out of pain. Despite the possibility of separation, he hoped the team, whoever they were, arrived soon.
The man had been speaking into the phone while he ruminated, but now closed it and said, “Everyone’s on their way. They’ve been worried. They didn’t know what to tell our wives.”
Their wives?
Desperately, he tried not to broadcast dismay and horror. If there was one thing he knew about himself already, it was that he shouldn’t be married to a woman. How did he ever let that happen? And this man was also married. The idea was sharp, cutting.
The man studied him blandly, waiting for an answer. He had to say something or sit here with his mouth open and the heaviness of loss. “Ah, well, good. Now they can stop worrying.”
His friend dropped his forehead into his hand. “We don’t have wives, you idiot. How long were you going to wait to tell me you lost your memory?”
As relief flooded him, he didn’t know what made him happier: not being married, his friend not being married, or this astonishing window into how his friend’s brilliant mind worked.
“What gave me away?” he asked.
“I’ll tell you later. Do you even know my name?”
“I really want to, but no,” he said honestly.
Perhaps too honestly. Hurt crossed the man’s face, followed quickly by concern. He said, “Zhan Yao.”
“Zhan Yao,” he repeated. “Zhan Yao. Do I call you that?”
He pressed his lips together. “Mostly. You don’t remember a thing?”
“Only waking up in this place. Oh, before that a really loud crack.”
Zhan Yao winced. “Yes, they hit you with a crowbar. Apparently it knocked all the sense out of you along with your memory.” He pulled him close—which, well—then turned him around and began to explore his head wound with surprisingly gentle fingers.
“Why are you being so mean to me?” he asked. Zhan Yao’s touch to his scalp hurt but also gave him a pleasant tingle.
“Because you are still refusing to ask me what your own name is.”
Oh, damn, he was good. “It’s Bai.”
“Bai what?”
He tried hard to remember. Your own name was fundamental, right? Zhan Yao’s hands came out of his hair and he turned back around as he thought. Just before the little bit of ignorance could become truly upsetting, Zhan Yao put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Yutang. Bai Yutang.”
Having the name back was like taking a deep breath. “Bai Yutang. Got it, Zhan Yao.”
Zhan Yao rolled his eyes a little, but he seemed more at ease now that they both knew their names. There was one thing, though. Bai Yutang tore away the cuff of his left sleeve and pressed it under the man’s nose, wiping away the trail of blood. He folded it in half and handed it to Zhan Yao, who brought it automatically up to apply pressure, staring at him all the while.
He’d only meant to make Zhan Yao more comfortable in some small way, but it occurred to him now that he’d been quite intimate. Then he saw Zhan Yao’s soft smile half-hidden by the make-do kerchief and thought, maybe we’re just like this. He had woken up in Zhan Yao’s lap, after all.
He sat down beside him against the stone wall. “Zhan Yao, how do we know each other?”
He dabbed at his nose a few times. “I’d like to tell you, but there is compelling research showing that it’s best for those with amnesia to remember things on their own.”
“How do you know that offhand?”
Zhan Yao turned and raised both eyebrows at him.
“You mean I have to remember that on my own too? What if it takes a long time? I can’t just walk around not knowing the basic facts about our lives.”
Zhan Yao thought for a time. “No, you’re right. That would be too disorienting and could slow down your recovery. I’ll give you some basics. You and I are co-leaders of the Special Crimes Investigation unit, or S.C.I. Does that ring a bell?”
“I’ve heard of S.C.I. and I have a vague idea of what they do. But we run it together?”
“You’re the captain, and I’m the psychological consultant, but yes.”
“Aha! So that’s how you know how to treat amnesia.”
He looked unhappy. “There’s no way to treat amnesia reliably. I just know some best practices.”
He really didn’t want to think about how he was going to beat the total loss of his memory. But he did want to know everything about Zhan Yao.
“Do you like working at S.C.I.? How long have you been there? What is it that you do, exactly?”
“That’s what you want to know?” Zhan Yao lowered the increasingly bloody cuff from his face to show off a full frown. “What about your own life?”
Bai Yutang shrugged. “I’ll learn that eventually. When the team gets here we might get split up. I want to know about you in case we don’t see each other after that.”
Zhan Yao stared for a long time, then started coughing again, expelling some water in the process. Bai Yutang put a steadying arm around him, not liking the rough spasms that shook his frame. When the coughing subsided, he needed a minute to catch his breath, involuntary tears leaking down his face. Bai Yutang swept his finger across his cheeks to remove them.
“Xiao Bai,” Zhan Yao finally said. “We’ll go to the hospital together, and then go home to my place. You practically live there. Okay?”
Too stunned to reply, Bai Yutang only nodded.
—
The rest of the day passed in a blur. When the team arrived, they turned out to be a group of fashionably dressed young-ish people who stared at the two of them with varying degrees of wide-eyed concern. Zhan Yao addressed them outside the house while keeping one hand on Bai Yutang’s shoulder for balance. His left ankle was twisted, but he wouldn’t say how it had happened. Bai Yutang had no idea how he himself looked. He’d noticed some dried blood flaking down out of his hair, and he felt uncomfortably rumpled, but Zhan Yao was by far the most visibly injured.
For that reason, perhaps, the team hastened to agree to all of Zhan Yao’s orders and rushed inside to obey, leaving them to climb into an ambulance and go to the hospital.
The hospital discharged them hours and hours later. Bai Yutang had acquiesced to a number of brain scans, which found inflammation, but no cranial fractures. He’d return after the swelling went down for more tests. Zhan Yao had been right about amnesia treatment; there really was very little to do.
Meanwhile, Zhan Yao’s ankle had been set, his wrists disinfected and wrapped in gauze, and ice packs applied to the various bruises all over his body, including the terrible discoloration below his left eye. The water in his lungs was his most worrying problem. Bai Yutang sat with him as he coughed and coughed in a little private exam room, expelling more water than Bai Yutang would have thought possible. They hadn’t spoken much since getting to the hospital, Zhan Yao becoming less and less communicative as he finally succumbed to exhaustion and gave himself over to treatment.
On the cab ride home, as Zhan Yao had called it, Bai Yutang took in Zhan Yao’s slumped form and half-closed eyes and realized that with his memory gone, he would need to become good at piecing together stories. For instance, he lacked bruising except for the hits he’d taken in the fight in the basement, while Zhan Yao had extensive bruising in areas you wouldn’t associate with combat but would expect to see after a beat-down. Since they could only have had time for the water after Bai Yutang woke up, the beating must have taken place beforehand, probably when they had been kidnapped. And since Bai Yutang knew he would never allow that to happen, it must have taken place after he took the hit to his head.
So, he’d been hit on the head, lost consciousness, and needed protecting as they were taken. Zhan Yao had provided, just like he had provided when they came to drag one of them up from the basement, and just like he was providing now, despite being so tired. The truth of what Zhan Yao would do for him sent a frisson of terror through Bai Yutang.
He put his concerns aside when the cab pulled up to a police dorm and Zhan Yao led the way with his recovered key card and keys. His apartment was a comfortably furnished one-bedroom with pleasingly white decor accented here and there by primary colors. The living spaces were a little untidy, but the kitchen was spotless.
Bai Yutang took in as much as he could while crowding Zhan Yao, who was too tired to capably manage the single crutch he’d accepted at the hospital. Zhan Yao led the way into the bedroom and sat heavily on the bed. It was a nice king-size and looked comfortable enough to climb into himself, and actually, Bai Yutang realized he was pretty tired. The couch had looked like a dubious spot for it, but apparently he stayed over all the time, so it must be fine.
Zhan Yao was looking at him, bleary-eyed. “I’m going to pass out whether I want to or not. Will you be okay?”
“Of course. Um, call me if you need me,” he said, pointing vaguely toward the living room.
After cleaning up a little in the bathroom, he fumbled around in a linen closet and set up a comfortable enough bed for himself on the couch, wondering why the bedding hadn’t been more accessible for regular use. It didn’t matter in the face of so many other mysteries, though, and he was putting all of them off for tomorrow. With that thought, he switched off the lamp, throwing the room into darkness.
“Bai Yutang!”
He shot up and then practically killed himself hitting the hallway door jamb before reaching Zhan Yao’s room and switching on the light. “Are you okay?”
“Ugh, turn that off.” Zhan Yao lay under the covers, dress shirt unbuttoned, head heavy on a pillow. He squinted unhappily. When Bai Yutang switched it off, he said, “Now get into bed.”
Thank God. Bai Yutang slipped into the other side and since it felt right, he slid closer to Zhan Yao, just short of touching. They both relaxed and were soon asleep.
Sometime later, Bai Yutang found himself awake, then became aware of miserable wet coughs coming from the bathroom. Knowing how little he could do to help in there, he got out of bed and went to the kitchen to make tea. By the time he brought out a cup, Zhan Yao had stopped coughing and was lying on the hallway carpet, smashed up against the wall with his head resting face-down on one arm, like he’d crawled pathetically out of the bathroom and run out of steam right there.
Bai Yutang slid down the wall to sit by his head. He tangled his fingers in Zhan Yao’s hair and then coaxed him up to sitting. Zhan Yao obliged by leaning back against Bai Yutang’s side, head resting backward on his shoulder.
“Do you want to tell me about it?” Bai Yutang asked.
Zhan Yao shrugged and sipped his tea. A few minutes later, he said, “They had a tub of water on the floor. When I wouldn’t answer their questions, they dragged me over and—well. I probably wouldn’t have swallowed so much, but the water had all this ice in it, and the cold surprised me. I was pretty sure I was going to drown, but then they lifted me out and asked more questions. Good tea.”
“Thanks,” Bai Yutang said, managing not to strangle the word the way he wanted to strangle those men.
“I think we did four or five rounds of that before I passed out. When I woke up you were fighting them in the basement.”
“How did you twist your ankle?” It had been fine when they’d walked him out of the basement.
Zhan Yao considered the wrapped ankle. “We were at odds regarding the tub and in the process, we got the floor pretty wet. I was trying to get leverage to get out of the tub and I slipped. Lucky I didn’t screw up my knee.”
Bai Yutang could see it too easily, Zhan Yao’s foot sliding on a smooth, wet floor, not finding purchase.
“Do we ever hug?”
“Not in public.”
“But here?”
“Yes, but in a minute, hm? I’m so sore.”
Unable to help himself, Bai Yutang laughed. He carefully pulled his arm from where Zhan Yao was using it as a seat back and positioned himself to comfortably put the arm around him. Zhan Yao sighed and went a little limp against his side. He was warm and needed a shower rather desperately, and Bai Yutang wondered whether he was falling in love or if a deep-seated, unforgettable love had been rising within him all day.
“When are you going to get your memory back?” Zhan Yao asked, hopefully rhetorically.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “You probably want me back, the real me.” He felt real enough, but others would look at him and see a difference. It was why he hadn’t yet asked whether he had family. Zhan Yao had done an extraordinary job so far of acting like nothing had changed, but he was so close with Bai Yutang that he couldn’t be blamed for wanting him back whole.
“Do you think you’re not real?” Zhan Yao asked. “That could be a sign of dissociation.”
“Shut up. You know what I mean. Wouldn’t you rather I have all my memories?”
“I would because it would make things easier for you. But you’re here, acting just like yourself, maybe a little more cautious, but that’s understandable given the circumstances. Yesterday, you were hit in the head with a crowbar and I sat with you for eighteen hours just hoping you would regain consciousness. Now here we are, and you’re you in all the ways that ever mattered to me. Very little has changed.”
Bai Yutang took that in for a few minutes. Others in his life wouldn’t feel that way; he was sure to fall short of expectations in ways he couldn’t even predict. If he had family, they might feel a profound loss. Who knew how the rest of his world would accept him? But he had Zhan Yao, who knew who he was and understood perhaps even better than Bai Yutang himself who he still was.
They got back into bed despite being grimy and sweaty from the past couple days. “Gonna have to change the sheets tomorrow,” Bai Yutang muttered, pulling the blankets up over them both.
For some reason, Zhan Yao laughed.
End