Billion to One

Promises to Keep

~~~Present Day~~~

*Flashback*

Chéng Xīnyán 's gazed followed Shen Wei's eyes around the enclosure before stopping at his rounded back. There were more than a hundred names carved into the stone. Each date, each untouchable life, a scar across his heart.

"Are you going to tell him?"

Shen Wei's eyes slide closed as he curled around himself, his pain leaking from his lips in aspirated deflation. The resilience of the man in front of her was immense, but nevertheless, finite.

"Eventually... he must know everything."

"Do you know what you are going to say?"

Shen Wei's silence stretched over the moment like a worn rubber band: vibrating with kinetic potential and dangerously close to snapping. Goosebumps formed over her arms. However, she remained unshaken, and her determination solidified. This was her Wei ge, and no matter the blowback, Chéng Xīnyán wouldn't leave him to face it alone.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A wave splashed up crashing against the glass. Chéng Xīnyán instinctually pulling back and bracing against the cold and the wet. She couldn't shake the chill in her bones, but she remained dry. The smell of the muddy water deepened the hold of the memory, making it difficult to separate from the pain of it and focus on the present.

She glanced up into the mirror, Cóng Bō's amber eyes sparked with concern. She shook off the chill and managed a weak smile.

"Duìbùqǐ... shuō shénme?

"Do you know what you are going to say?"

Hearing her question echoed back to her made her skin prickle and once again, the hair on her arms stood-on-end.

Back then, before she could examine her reaction, to the changing air, the space around Shen Wei had darkened. He immediately straightened to his full height, his chin lowered, his lids, raised slowly over pupils the colour of molten pitch.

In their relationship, this was the first time she had borne witness to Shen Wei's transition into The Envoy persona. Even without the mask, the image sent a chill down her spine. She was not frightened of him; that was an impossibility. In that moment, somewhat irrationally, she had become frightened for him.

She had never really been sure as to why that moment's chord, albeit hard struck, resonated so deeply; there was nothing she could have said, nothing she could have done, to change the outcome of events that followed. Yet, the foreshadowing of that moment would not pass gently by, it resurfaced regularly to torment her waking dreams and accuse her of failure.

Of what she had failed at, she couldn't be certain. All that she could be certain of was that, for the last year, the feeling of failure had festered inside her. It sat like a bit of undigested beef, fermenting and eating away at her self-confidence. She forced herself not to focus on the discomfort of it. Instead, she focused on easing the burdens of those around her.

The last year had been a tragic charade of public events and governmental scrutiny. SID stood between allies and adversaries, both with questionable fealty, simply to appease the powers that be.

They could not speak of their pain. They could not mourn. Hell, they could not even run from it, if it they wanted to. How would they explain what they were running from when their greatest heartache, never actually happened?

As a family, they fractured. Battle after battle, they faced hand-in-hand, but walked alone in their individual fears. The isolation was tearing them apart from within. And Chéng Xīnyán had seen what it to gentle hearts.