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Some days, Joyful Reunion likes to remind Shen Qiao that its effects don’t completely diminish, ever. He supposes that’s just what happens when a potent poison ravages your body and then you fall right off a cliff.
It’s not so annoying on normal days; visibility is difficult the darker it gets, but his martial arts are more than sufficient enough to make up for it, and as long as he doesn’t strain his eyes, it’s usually fine. He doesn’t tire quite as easily, but there’s a tension and ache to his muscles he has little memory of doing anything to warrant after extended physical activity.
His appetite tends to be—off, sometimes, but it’s not that unusual.
It’s normal, and fine, and so he mentions nothing to Yan Wushi. They don’t see each other as often as Yan Wushi would like, probably—and Shen Qiao doesn’t say it, but he knows he’s transparent enough that Yan Wushi can tell he feels about the same—so he feels that there is no need to worry his husband with something that can certainly be managed on his own time.
It’s fine.
/
“A-Qiao,” Yan Wushi hisses. “You couldn’t have mentioned this beforehand?”
“There’s hardly anything worth mentioning,” Shen Qiao protests, cradling his head with one hand, tightening his grip on Shanhe Tongbei with the other. There’s blood, though he can’t tell where it’s coming from, exactly. The world is… spinning oddly, in a way it probably should not after one hit to the head. He’s taken multiple over the years and none were so painful and long-lasting as this.
“Joyful Reunion relapses are not worth mentioning?” Yan Wushi demands.
“How do you know this is that?” Shen Qiao retorts, just as pain stabs through his eyes. Right. He walked into that one, he quickly realizes.
“A perfectly healthy martial artist, a proficient master, taking ill all of a sudden in this manner?” Yan Wushi asks, tone hard and upset, but he takes Shanhe Tongbei from Shen Qiao, sheathes it properly, and lifts Shen Qiao into his arms carefully regardless. Shen Qiao frowns, opening his eyes—he hadn’t even realized he’d closed them—to look at his husband with displeasure.
He is met with a glower of Yan Wushi’s own and understands, yet again, that this isn’t an argument he’ll win.
“I suppose it is strange,” he relents. He closes his eyes again. “I can’t think of why it would happen now, though.”
“How long have you had relapsing symptoms?”
“…a few months, on and off.”
Yan Wushi has nothing to say to that except an annoyed click of his tongue. Shen Qiao sighs. Yes, he does deserve Yan Wushi’s ire rather than the other way around this time, doesn’t he?
/
Yan Wushi’s residences are comfortable and lavish to a frankly unbelievable extent, but Shen Qiao isn’t about to complain, especially not this time. The pain recedes by the time he’s laid down on a bed—the same bed he and Yan Wushi have shared multiple times—but he’s grateful for the soft surface and the gentle hand massaging his temples.
“Where does it hurt, A-Qiao?” Yan Wushi asks him. Next thing he knows, there’s a cool cloth dabbing away at the wound on his head. “This doesn’t look too bad.”
“My eyes, mostly,” Shen Qiao says. He sighs. “My vision suffers, sometimes, but never to an extent that it becomes a bother.”
“If it suffers, then it’s a bother.”
“Is Yan-zongzhu of Huanyue Sect saying that?” Shen Qiao asks. He can’t really resist this chance to say: “is he admitting that health issues are something that should be dealt with?”
“A-Qiao,” Yan Wushi warns. The cool cloth lifts away and a different sensation—possibly a kind of medicine Yan Wushi keeps stocked around his houses—touches the gash on his scalp instead. That’s about when he realizes his hair has been freed from his guan, too.
He really is very out of it, isn’t he…
“Does the rest of your body hurt?” Shen Qiao considers the question for a second, trying to identify whether his body feeling like a lump of rocks is due to the hit to the head or because it does hurt, and his mind is slow to catch up to that. Then he nods, figuring he should play it safe. “Alright, then.”
Over the course of the next half an hour, he’s fed medicines that make his nose scrunch up involuntarily (and Yan Wushi does take notice and tease him mercilessly about it, because of course he does), his meridians checked every few minutes, and fed a light meal that makes him drowsy and also helps him arrive at a last and final realization that the headaches he has been mildly bothered about have affected his sleep and eating, too.
He doesn’t say this to Yan Wushi. He’s fairly certain Yan Wushi realizes, anyway.
/
When he wakes up again, Yan Wushi is sound asleep at his side, hand clasped over Shen Qiao’s wrist.