Content Warning: Some unsettling imagery re: Yue Fei’s dreams.
Yue Fei has trained himself to be a good sleeper. Waking up screaming is unacceptable whether living in a group home or acting as a live-in assistant. People will tolerate trauma, but not at the expense of their own peace and sense of order.
But turbulent emotions churn up dark waters, and upon falling asleep he is once more treated to the bad dreams that he’d been learning to lock away since he stood on that concrete easement and spied the strange flash of white sticking strangely out from the sunken tires at the edge. Once more, he’s wrapped in the phantasms that have followed him since he first dove in and pulled, finding those hateful rocks in his pockets. Knowing this was the answer to his confession.
In the most constant dream, he pushes Yue Cibai down with his own hands, every word of unwanted love allowing the water to rise and drown him, not letting go as time fast-forwards and his eyes turn milky beneath him. When he’s lucky, he’s the one in the depths, he’s the one who gets to die, he can pretend its a way to atone.
In the newest version, he kicks away from the dead and up to the surface, only to find Wei Qing falling and dashing against the rocks like a broken doll. Staring at him, crying, betrayal in every river of blood and bit of broken skin. It’s the worst, it’s hateful, it’s two bodies and three times the regret, it’s the lethargy in his limbs as he swims through water that drags like cement, never able to arrive fast enough, not even to catch Wei Qing’s last breath or prevent him from dying alone.
And yet-
For all the dread, there is progress.
Instead of waking to the pain of falling onto the unheated ceramic floor alone or being beaten by exhausted roommates, at every breach to the surface of these nightmares, he feels soft hands and hears gentle murmurs instead. Experiences Wei Qing beating back death with his presence. Drowsily kissing his temples, making promises that he won’t remember but Yue Fei still cherishes.
It doesn’t banish them, but it makes the dreams sting less. Replaces icy and stiff limbs with warm and comforting ones, rejection with belonging, despair with the hope of something more. Eventually, his exhausted body and spent mind quiet, and he’s able to sink into dreamlessness against the beating of Wei Qing’s heart.
For once, Yue Fei’s the one sleeping in late and snubbing the sun until it falls. Half of it is the drowsiness that comes from spending so many hours awake and tense with terror, and half of it is the desire to feel Wei Qing’s skin against his and to not have to think beyond the feel of him. It’s a very seductive combination. To listen to his breaths, to share the heat of his skin, all of him—
Still here. Still in his arms, so entrenched that he runs and (by the sounds of it) stumbles around in the dark the one time he has to get up and take care of physiological bits. Wants to be with him so badly that he’s being positively silly about it. Completely unguarded, completely perfect. Yue Fei wraps him back up and falls asleep sucking a lazy bruise against his upper arm.
—
Yue Fei’s right, Wei Qing had sacrificed his stubbed toes and general air of suavity in order to get back to bed as quickly as possible. It’s a tendency that he expects to nurture for the foreseeable future.
Wei Qing doesn’t want to leave Yue Fei alone.
Not after hearing him whimper in his sleep like that. Not after seeing him wake up and look so confused but relieved to see him each time. Not when he now has so much terrible fucking background knowledge to fill in the gaps about why his unflappable boyfriend is so very flapped.
Also, a small part of him doesn’t know how to have this conversation with Yue Fei any better than that aborted one with Wei Qiwan. So staying in bed and ignoring consciousness seems like a good, albeit cowardly, option. And they can both use the rest after a distinctly challenging start to their weekend. The rest and the lack of follow-up conversation.
Based on Yue Fei’s intelligence and what Wei Qing had bitten against his back while venting, it must be obvious that he got information about Yue Fei’s past. And based on the breakfast that was heated twice and eaten not once, Yue Fei clearly knew where he’d gone.
As someone that’s very ashamed of his own past, Wei Qing feels awkward about this.
About Yue Fei no doubt knowing that he (and his brother) know things that Yue Fei himself would clearly wish they didn’t. Those terse, self-hating sentences he gave Wei Qing weren’t close to the real story, and Wei Qing’s sure he’d rather Wei Qiwan not know at all.
The horses are already gone, but Wei Qing still has the impulse to lock the barn door.
This impulse is probably what leads him to use his rarely-exercised ‘young master’ privileges to order one of the desk workers to deliver fried chicken… not just to the penthouse, but directly to his bed. He steals a kiss and hides Yue Fei’s fake-sleeping head under the comforter when the door dings and the poor kid calls out so nervously.
Wei Qing doesn’t mind throwing away his face on this kind of excess, but Yue Fei is too buttoned-up for that, so into the covers he’s sent. Meanwhile, the kid trembles and manages to (eventually) traverse the living room like he’s crossing the Arctic. Poor little thing asks for permission thrice before actually opening the door.
That said, for all his babyfaced youthfulness, the kid’s wise enough not to ask why a mostly-naked Master Wei and a very large lump are in bed at six in the evening, or what he did wrong to be ordered to bring a family meal up and witness this. Probably Uncle Hui is still disappointed in his decision not to go to college.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
At the vacant look of the kid, Wei Qing takes pity and replaces the bucket with a wad of bills that he doesn’t bother counting.
Lf oijrtfr j rwlif jcv rjsr, “Zs ifur jgfc’a mbcnfclfca~” jcv tjr ab mtbxf vbkc tlr ijeutafg jr atf qbbg xlv oiffr rb ojra tf’r jiwbra kbgglfv tf’ii ajxf atf olgf fzla. Tef Mfl clyyifr tlr kjlra lc mfcregf, Qfl Hlcu olrtfr tlw eq jcv gfqijmfr tlr rabwjmt klat j mtlmxfc vgewralmx.
Sure enough, this kind of outrageous behavior is enough to get Yue Fei out of his catatonia.
Mostly to drag him and his oily hands away from the comforter and to their rarely-used dining room table, but it’s still progress. And neatly sidesteps the emotional bits. Thank goodness for cleanliness habits.
“The oil will cling and your whole room will smell like a chicken shack.”
“Then I’ll squeeze in with you.”
Sure enough. Under the twin powers of shamelessness and terminal neat-freakery, there’s nothing that can’t be de-emphasized. At least until they’ve padded their stomachs. Wei Qing feeds Yue Fei, Yue Fei feeds Wei Qing. It’s high-calorie and frankly not very good, but they still draw out the slapdash meal and the caretaking opportunities it provides.
—
In the end, Wei Qing doesn’t quite have the nerve to explain, except to say that he’s sorry and his feelings haven’t changed and to complain that Yue Fei really, really should learn how to be more unbiased in his reviews of his own past.
It’s a more eloquent repetition of his wall-pressing from the morning, capped off by him hesitating for half a day and, in the end, forwarding along the videos that he’d bullied a still-off-kilter Wei Qiwan into sending to him. Wei Qing uses the excuse of a shower of abominable length to give Yue Fei private time to watch.
He washes longer than he should.
—
The interviews are… a lot to handle.
Even through his own complex feelings, Yue Fei registers just how long Wei Qing has been gone, the barely-discernible beating of the shower giving him the comfort of knowing the parameters. When the water ends, Wei Qing will return. Until then, his feelings are his.
If only he knew what they were.
He’s breathless, his already cracked control jostled and jarred by the sight of two people that he didn’t let himself think of, talking about the person that he didn’t dare think of. He’s upset. He’s embarrassed. He’s angry that the stones of his well-ordered life have pried up and his shame has been exposed to his most favorite person.
He’s uncomfortable with the words Wei Qing said, about his (lack of) guilt and Wei Qiwan’s role in getting this information. He feels sick to return to the past, he feels wrong-footed to see people that were frozen forever in his mind as teens, suddenly grown up and so different, yet somehow still together. Happy.
He wonders what Yue Cibai would have grown up to look like if he’d never had the misfortune of meeting him. He wonders if he too could become a happy person.
But right under those bad feelings, sometimes even overlapping them, are other softer and more unfamiliar emotions. Harder to look at. Like his relief, that A’Fen and Xiao Fen had gotten out and been able to grow up. His gratitude, and the simultaneous sick feeling of not deserving it, when it sounds like they don’t hate him like he always thought they would. For leaving, for touching them, for both. The stone that drops, when he learns that the whole time that he’s been holding this dark secret, just he and Lu-laoshi–
A’Fen knew too. From the beginning, he knew. Which means that in those four months that he can’t bear to look at, when Yue Cibai was still the corpse that floated past every time he closed his eyes, when A’Fen and Xiao Fen took such good care of him and were so soft– A’Fen had already known the why that they didn’t speak of.
And hadn’t blamed him. Even then.
And then there’s the most selfish feeling of all:
For all his bitterness and his sense of being stripped and violated by this exposure of his own violations…
Part of him is grateful for the interviews. Grateful to Wei Qiwan for being obsessive enough to get them. Because for all the scars that are now exposed, it’s the words of A’Fen and Xiao Fen that do what his guilt prevented: Finished the story for Wei Qing, and brought him back.
Even five years of intensive therapy and another eight of check-ins with Lu-laoshi are not enough for Yue Fei to let go of his bone-deep guilt. Even if he didn’t know what he was doing, his special status in the cult brought Yue Cibai to that unsurvivable state, and his body was the weapon that carved him out. Not even Wei Qing’s words and bites and love are enough for Yue Fei to shake off the sins that he committed as soon as his body grew capable of that thing that they dared call making love.
But-
The trust and the anger and the coming back that Wei Qing has shown, combined with everything else, is enough to carve a small chasm, between endless self-flagellation and his desire to forget everything in his devotion to Wei Qing. And in that chasm, he can exist as someone that cannot be washed clean, but will linger and try nonetheless. For Wei Qing.
No doubt it would be better to do it for himself, but if we’re indulging in fantasies, it would be better if it had not happened at all.
As Wei Qing’s endless shower continues, Yue Fei catalogs the thorns in his heart and the soft cotton padding of his life with Wei Qing. And then he slowly and painfully packs it all up, washes his tear-stained face, and throws away the entire tablet. It’s not like they don’t have others.
Finally, still in sweats, he joins Wei Qing in the shower and just holds him.
—
Both of their sleep schedules are super fucked.
That’s what happens when one party stays up all night in dread and chores and the other drinks-sleeps-cramps on an uncomfortable couch, only to both fall asleep in the middle of the goddamn morning and not wake up until dinner time. It’s nothing that a small shift can’t fix in a few days, but in the interim nighttime feels like a minefield, with not nearly enough distractions to keep the pressure in the penthouse from plummeting again.
It feels like an atmosphere for confessions, and the pair of them are already wrung out.
Dangerous, and stifling. Or at least it would be, in any other relationship. But it just so happens that before he turned over a new leaf, Wei Qing was the absolute, gold-plated, undisputed champion of wasting time and running from feelings. If he was the second most debauched dilettante in the city, no one would dare claim to be first, and that firsthand experience is going to pay dividends.
He knows all the places that you can run to keep from feeling sad in the middle of the night, all the rooms where you can lose your sense of self and all the games where you can become a child again, absent the hurt of neglect or coercion. And a few of them don’t even involve drugs or sex or the kinds of crimes that require a bail bondsman. Anyway, worst comes to worst, he has added Wei Qiwan back to his emergency contacts list. Give his elder brother a chance to prove that stuff about being there for him.
They’re going to paint the town red.
This is his time to shine. He leans forward and winks.
“Hey, do you wanna go… get tired?”
Yue Fei flinches. Wei Qing jumps out of his laziness at the brief moment of panic that Yue Fei lets slip and quickly connects it to his own ambiguous wording. “Fuck, not like that. Normally yes, but… baby, do you really think I’m out-of-touch enough to try to climb you after the day we’ve just had?”
“I didn’t mean to-”
“I’m not blaming you. And when we’re both up for it, yeah, always, no doubt. But in the meantime– Baby, how do you feel about the classic delinquent date? School night, arcade, street food, chaos?”
Yue Fei’s lips twitch. Possibly because it’s a Saturday. Wei Qing presses his advantage regardless of where it comes from.
“As a former high-schooler in this city, I am an expert at mostly-clean fun. Dare you step into my world?”
And there it is. The light is back, at least a little, in Yue Fei’s eyes. No doubt he’s laughing at him– after all, Yue Fei was around for Wei Qing’s high school career and is familiar with just how little of this type of fun the workaholic brother-worshiper had. Hell, the one time that he fell asleep in class, he set himself his own reflection essay, even though the teacher hadn’t noticed or called him out! He turned it into his fucking brother, tattling on himself like a complete weirdo.
But ridiculousness is excellent medicine. Wei Qing’s a genius.
He snorts and does his very best delinquent routine as he confronts the impossible task of dressing Yue Fei for daring fun. Of course, that means they have to go into his closet. Yue Fei’s got a pair of black jeans that are good enough, but none of his shirts have so much as a single flirtatious rip or curse word. Although Wei Qing’s closet has also been cleaned out when it comes to mesh and messy English slogans and questionable glitter globs, Yue Fei’s just the right size of bigger than him–
Right enough that his just too thin white v-neck henley looks like a goddamn underwear ad when Yue Fei is squeezed into it. Slap on a brown leather bracelet and throw some gel in his hair and he’s positively, devastatingly handsome. He always is, but damn.
It’s actually not partywear at all, but Wei Qing’s definition of partying has already been downgraded from NC-17 to PG-13. Also, Yue Fei looks– really, really good. Wei Qing hurries up and shimmies into his own pair of (tighter) black jeans and (looser) white shirt and plasters himself against his still super-compliant boyfriend. He even finds the bracelet’s slightly chunkier twin and adds it to his own wrist, blushing a little at the overall effect in the mirror that they’re wrapped around one another in front of. Ah? What’s this?
In his excitement, he seems to have scammed Yue Fei into another relationship milestone? Ah, maybe it can still be salvaged, maybe he didn’t yet notice—
“Couples outfit?” Yue Fei’s voice is very soft, a little startled… And very, very pleased.
Wei Qing ducks behind him and hides his incandescent face. He swears he’s innocent. Even when he finally got a boyfriend, he didn’t dare do such a thing! He wanted to, but he was worried that it would be seen as trying so hard, that Gao Zhong would be embarrassed…. Ah, it’s not like he’s been plotting this since he first knew what relationships were! An accident! A coincidence! He’s wrongly accused!
…
It’s fine, it’s fine, as long as Yue Fei likes it. He can even humor him with more outfits in the future. He may already have some ideas. He’s willing to make the sacrifice of pulling those ideas out. After all, dignity and maturity are nothing in the face of the lightest smile from a beauty. That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it.
It would be more believable if he didn’t spend the cab ride over snapping pictures of their interlocked hands, matching sleeves, and bracelets on display for his positively anemic friends circle and newly updated lock screen.
—
Wei Qiwan is one of the few people in Wei Qing’s scrubbed friend’s circle, and the only one who cares enough to have an alert set for Wei Qing’s WeChat updates. After all, he’s not sleeping either. Not with the dull pain that spreads from his hand every time he tenses, and the endless discomfort of the wrapped-too-tight bandage from the family physician, who had tutted as he irrigated the small cuts and wrapped his hand up in a gauzy mitten.
Muttered something about one brother acting up just as the other had calmed down.
Anyway. Between his not-broken but still painful hand and the torturous rabbit hole he’d decided to find the floor of, Wei Qiwan’s up late. Up late and so high-strung that he can’t tell if he’s relieved or annoyed, that Wei Qing had shown up, completely disrupted his weekend, no his life, and then fucked off to take sappy photos on a date night with Yue Fei.
He still ends up throwing him a disgusted ‘like.’
Throwing him a like and returning to the seemingly endless maze of people that might have hurt his brother, in the years when he wasn’t looking. It’s a list that is disgusting in its breadth. Even just those that he knows to have been Wei Qing’s companions are daunting. Nevermind that so many of Wei Qing’s events were unofficial, random parties and houses that he found himself in without the paper trail of bar tabs or reports from other young master’s handlers.
Sometimes, hell really is one’s own choices.
Sure, in the 31 months that he snubbed him, it’s true that no second Gao Zhong appeared to stir up a business war or steal secrets with pillow talk. After unilaterally cutting ties and contracts with the single one of his so-called friends that had dare be caught getting blown by his brother, Wei Qing hadn’t been used in such a way again. His feelings hadn’t been treated as a means of insider trading. Technically, Wei Qiwan had accomplished his goal. Prevented Wei Qing from being used without destroying his belief in love. Just his belief in brotherhood.
But what a Pyrrhic victory.
He hadn’t considered the kind of use that could occur in those hedonistic places where Wei Qing had so given up on himself. When this started, he hadn’t believed that Wei Qing would abandon himself in such a way. When it escalated… His anger got the best of him, and part of him… felt that Wei Qing deserved bad treatment for the way he was acting. Part of him got lost in the act and let himself feel that disgust that he’d once faked.
But he hadn’t, that bad treatment, he didn’t-
He didn’t mean it. Even in the moments he meant it, when Wei Qing infuriated him the most, he wouldn’t want him to be forced. Never wanted-
Still, there’s no going back. All he can do is prove himself–
Starting by tracking down and punishing whoever had hurt Wei Qing.
Other than himself, that is.
Author’s Corner:
If only the posting schedule worked out so that the date next chapter was posted on 5/20. Ai, what missed opportunities.
Anyway, emotions, huh? Lots of feelings happening all at once.
Thank you for the chapter~
Wie Qiwan, my baby. I just want hin to be fucking happy T-T
Me too, me too.
“anyway, emotions, uh ?” Is the best sentence about life I think ahah
Thank you for the chapter 🍩
🥲
poor Yue Fei, poor Wei Qing, and poor Wei Qiwan.
thanks for the chapter <3
Oh my gosh – look what happens to Yue Fei when you take him off cruise control! Sweats in the shower? But he deserved to know, if he wanted to, and now Wei Qing is getting all of him. From my perspective, they are absolutely young enough to indulge themselves in couple outfits. I think there’s a certain receptionist who would love to help them choose!