The nightmare had no beginning he could identify and no end he could find.

He was back in Shen Zihao’s house. Then in the Xue household. Then somewhere that was neither and both, and the sounds were wrong and the light was wrong and his body would not respond no matter how hard he fought.

He could feel himself trying, the desperate internal effort of someone pushing against a wall that would not move, and nothing happened.

Nothing happened.

He could only lie there while the familiar sounds got closer and the familiar dread filled every part of him that was still conscious enough to feel anything.

He whimpered.

He could hear it, thin and small and nothing like the sound he was trying to make, and he whimpered again because it was the only thing his body would allow him.

His face was wet.

He did not know how long he was there.

Time in that place did not move the way it was supposed to.

Then he heard a voice.

"Guiying? Guiying, are you okay?"

It came from somewhere outside the nightmare, distant at first and then closer.

"Guiying. Come on, the doctor is here. Say something."

Another voice, unfamiliar, calm and professional. "He appears to be experiencing sleep paralysis, sir."

"Then do something about it."

"Of course." The professional voice shifted, directed now at Guiying, measured and clear. "I need you to try to wiggle your toes. Then your fingers. Try to visualize a calm space, someone you feel safe with. Focus on your breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth."

Guiying heard the instructions.

He tried to follow them.

The wall pushed back.

Then Liuxian’s voice came again, closer this time, low and unhurried and completely steady.

"My hands are on your feet, Guiying. Can you feel that?" A pause. "You can do this. You are stronger than whatever is holding you there. Break out of it."

Something shifted.

It was small at first, a crack in the wall rather than the wall coming down, but it was there. Guiying pushed toward it with everything he had, toward the voice, toward the hands he could now dimly feel at the end of the bed, toward the sound of someone who was not afraid and was not going anywhere.

He broke through.

His eyes opened and his body lurched upright and the first thing that came out of him was not words but a sob, raw and completely uncontrolled, and then he was grabbing Liuxian and holding on with both hands and crying in a way he had not cried in years, the kind of crying that had no dignity and no restraint and did not care about either.

He had been back there. In that house, in that room, in that body that could not move and could not fight and could only endure whatever came next.

Five years of it compressed into however long he had been lying on that bed, and he had not been able to get out, he had not been able to get out, and it had felt exactly like dying.

He cried.

Liuxian held him without saying anything, one hand at his back and one at the back of his head, steady and present and entirely unmoved by the fact that Guiying was currently soaking his shirt.

Behind them the doctor said quietly, "I will give you some space," and the door clicked shut.

Guiying did not know how long they stayed like that.

Eventually the crying slowed, then stopped, leaving him hollowed out and exhausted in the particular way of someone who had been carrying something heavy for a very long time and had just, without meaning to, put it down.

Guiying drew his knees up and breathed carefully.

That was when he felt it.

The heat that had been sitting at the edges of his awareness all day chose this moment, with its complete and characteristic lack of consideration for circumstances, to make itself known properly. His pheromones flooded the room before he could do anything about it. His skin felt wrong, too hot, too sensitive, and his breathing was already shallower than it should have been.

Liuxian went very still beside him.

Guiying looked at him and saw exactly what he expected to see, that careful controlled stillness of a dominant Alpha exercising significant restraint in a small room that was rapidly filling with Omega heat pheromones.

"I am sorry," Guiying said. His voice came out unsteady. "I forgot to order suppressants."

Liuxian said nothing. He stood and picked Guiying up, moving toward the bed.

"Not the bed," Guiying said immediately.

Liuxian paused and looked at him.

Guiying looked at the bed. The pillow still had the indent from where his head had been. The blanket was still twisted. Just looking at it made his chest tighten.

Liuxian understood without needing it explained. He carried him to the small couch by the balcony door instead and set him down carefully.

"Leave me here," Guiying said, already pulling at his shirt because it was unbearably hot. "Before I lose my mind and jump on you."

Liuxian looked at him.

"How long do your heats usually last?" he asked.

Guiying shook his head. His cycle had been irregular for years, disrupted by the Xue household and then by Shen Zihao’s house and the constant ambient pheromones of both. He had never had a clean heat in his life.

"I don’t know," he said. "Maybe two or three days."

What he did not say was that none of his previous heats had happened in a room that smelled like Liu Liuxian. None of them had happened in the presence of a dominant high class Alpha whose pheromones had been wrapping around him since the day he arrived. His past heats had been manageable, uncomfortable but survivable, but this one was already nothing like those.

It was getting worse by the second.

The heat moved through him in waves now, each one stronger than the last, and his skin felt unbearable and his clothes felt worse, and without fully deciding to he had already pulled his shirt over his head because it was so hot, so unbearably hot, and wet and sticky and he could not think properly and Liuxian was right there and his pheromones were not helping at all.

"I am going to lose my mind," he said, with the last remaining piece of coherent thought he had access to. "And then I am going to jump on you. So you should probably leave."