DAN HENG WHY :((( - Blog Posts

memories of you.

pairing. dan heng il x gn. reader.

summary. over the course of time, even the brightest memories fade — yet you still cling onto something long forgotten by the other.

notes. supposed to be sleeping rn but this just hit me lol it’s kinda short and unedited but likes and reblogs are appreciated!!

You don’t know what hurts more. 

The years you’ve spent apart, or the realisation you’re confronted with, as you come face to face with someone you had long thought to be buried by past memory. 

“Dan Feng?” 

His name comes to your mind — your lips, almost instantaneously, its utterance one of disbelief as you look upon him. You know of the sin he’s committed, and the life he was consigned to within a prison of stone. 

He shouldn’t be here. 

His rebirth had been his escape, his liberation. It gave him a chance to chase freedom — traversing across worlds and the astral seas, without so much of a look at the past he’s left behind him. 

Yet a part of you wishes he did, to hope that he had at least thought of you, to hold some form of sentimentality towards what had once been his home, and the memories cumulated over a thousand years. 

Because you’ve never truly let him escape your memory — his image still haunts you, his name still spoken amongst the stories of old within the Xianzhou. How were you to forget such a person like him? 

But it appears he does not share such sentiments, regarding you coolly, the hope you had held onto crumbling just as quickly, with a single confession upon his lips. 

“I am not Dan Feng.” 

It’s unshakable, the look in his viridian eyes, that holds no semblance of recognition towards you, his cold gaze dismissively passing over you as if you were another cloud knight in his midst. The words aren’t even directed at you — there’s no acknowledgement of your existence. 

The general beside you sighs. You can’t bring yourself to look at him — you can already feel the pitying look he’s cast in your direction. 

There’s a sinking feeling of further disappointment in your chest as he brushes past you, paying you no mind. You can only stand aside and watch him and Jing Yuan converse. You wonder what it is that you look like to him — just another bewildered soldier under the famed general’s command. 

You’re not someone important. But you feel an aching tug on your heart just the same, as the general lets out a soft chuckle at the vidyahara’s words. 

It’s bittersweet really. 

You can picture the same moment from centuries ago, where this hadn’t been such a lonesome reunion beneath grey monotone skies, surrounded by ghosts of the past. 

The skies were clear then, joined by the laughter of a group. And Dan Feng, he had laughed with you, raising a cup in toast. But it’s been reduced to a mere echo in your ears, something you occasionally imagine hearing as you reminisce on memories that only you’re left to hold within your heart. 

It hurts you to see him deny his own existence — to deny the past intertwined with it. And when he finally turns away from Jing Yuan to glance back at you with those eyes of his, it’s an almost familiar scene. 

Yet his eyes are glassy, devoid of light. 

“Who are you?” 

You can only look at him sadly with a tight lipped smile. 

( A faint memory emerges of the day he had confessed against a similar landscape, and he had looked at you with such devout emotion in his eyes. )

For you stand hundreds of years in the future — now strangers to one another, and a forgotten history between you. You’ve been brought back to the beginning again, as if this world is following the cycle of his rebirth, this the first introduction to the one who has no memory of you. 

“I’m… Y/N.” 

It somehow sounds like a final farewell to you — to all you know, as he silently nods. 

“I am Dan Heng.” 

Dan Feng is never mentioned again. He shoots you a blank look when you open your mouth to repeat a name that is long known to be dead to him. He shakes his head and merely repeats the same phrase, voice weighed with dull sincerity. “I am Dan Heng.” 

You sigh, your shoulders slumping. “I’m sorry.” 

It seemed nothing would get through to him. 

You can’t help but still see flickers of him within this new incarnation. He looks as if he’s been plucked from a moment in your memories, as if he was just the high elder of the Vidyahara, quietly gazing into the distance of the Scalegorge waterscape. 

He’s so close, yet so far from the man you once knew.  

You want to believe there is still some fragment of his past self buried within him, but you know that to be a selfish wish. How could you presume to know him after centuries of silence? 

He’s changed. And you’re still just clinging onto a past you cannot let go of — these memories of him. 

Perhaps it’s because you never had a chance to truly say goodbye, your final partings torn away from you alongside the moments where you had been happiest — for they mean nothing when they no longer exist in the mind of the other. 

You don’t want to say those words of farewell. And he doesn’t want you to hold on. 

As to him, he must look back on them as moments of grief, each building up to that final act of transgression. You may not have witnessed the brutality of this world, but he had seen it fall apart before his very eyes — and attempted to piece it back together with his own hands. It’s cost him more than you can presume to imagine. 

He doesn’t want to go back to that. 

He’s paid the price a thousand times over, so much he’s forgotten why. He doesn’t need a cause to remember the pain. 

‘Dan Heng’ doesn’t want to hear any of it, not even when you walk through the place that was once his home, of the history deeply rooted here. Rather, his eyes are constantly drifting to the sky above, where a cluster of stars twinkle in the sky. 

You can tell he wishes to return elsewhere. 

He’s left this world behind long ago — his heart no longer lies here, given up the day he had gone against the principles of life and death that bind your species. 

Perhaps you won’t forget him. 

But to him, you’re a distant memory to the countless futures he’s to live.