“Why a cab?”
“Hmmm?” Wei Qing tilts his phone and snaps another picture. It makes Yue Fei’s ears feel red enough to drip blood, especially since the old cabbie auntie is smiling and shaking her head and talking to herself about how her daughter ‘needs to try harder, all the cute ones are pairing off and flying away.’
Yue Fei repeats himself.
“We have a car. More than one. Why a cab?”
“Because delinquents don’t do things like care where they park!”
Yue Fei indulges in the delinquency of softly biting his boyfriend’s ear. He can see what Wei Qing is doing.
Distracting him. Keeping it light, making him feel loved and included without the heaviness of sex.
It makes him feel warm and anchored and present. The weirdness of randomly cosplaying as young do-nothings is eye-catching enough to keep him from looking back into the past. Very effective, and very welcome. Not to mention, little plays like this? They let him imagine what it might have been like, to live a different life, to meet Wei Qing sooner. To have been a normal person. So he scoots a little closer on and lets his legs spread out and his arm lay across the back of the seat, fingers just brushing Wei Qing’s shoulder. Like a young boy trying to figure out if his crush likes him might do.
Yue Fei puffs out his chest a little when they take a turn a tiny bit too fast and Wei Qing uses it as an excuse to hook his ankle and lay his head against his shoulder. In the play, this must mean that his crush likes him back. The cuddliest delinquent ever, that’s who Yue Fei gets to pull out of the stale taxi as they reach their first tilt-a-whirl attraction:
An honest-to-goodness arcade, the kind that is becoming a panda in the world of internet cafes and emulators.
Yue Fei blinks and feels his heart beat a little more rapidly.
Yet another first.
Wei Qing takes his hand and pulls him forward, narrating with so much excitement that Yue Fei relaxes, knowing that this isn’t just a distraction for him but something pleasant for Wei Qing as well. It’s easier to accept kindness when it’s not a sacrifice on the part of the other person.
“God, it’s been years, I can’t believe this one weathered the storm. When I was little, every time I got a good exam grade, I’d pull my brother here to play with me and try to trick him into the shooting games. But no, the closest we got was Tekken when I was in middle school. And he didn’t even let me win!”
Yue Fei coughs and respects Wei Qing enough to tell him the bitter truth.
“In fairness, even if he tried very hard to lose…” Wei Qing clutches his heart with mock outrage.
“Yue Fei! Betrayal! Already! This prince has never met a general who is so capricious!” Ah yes, time-traveling general-prince delinquents. Of course. The most obvious option. Yue Fei’s smiling in earnest now, smiling, and bowing like an antique to hide it.
General Yue very honestly admits his wrongs and buys his prince something made almost entirely out of sugar and food coloring. Then he beats him at Tekken. Then he beats him at Tekken accidentally. And so on and so forth. Wei Qing’s ability to find all the death screens is truly… ah, he could probably have a career as a very specific type of beta tester. Anyway, in the interest of coaxing, calm and collected Yue Fei very reasonably spends a thousand yuan trying and failing and eventually succeeding at pulling an ugly stuffed sloth out of an shamelessly exploitative claw machine.
“I… this is such a boyfriend thing, but you know… you’re the first person to ever…” Wei Qing fiddles with the thing’s crooked ears.
He holds the bug-eyed little sweatshop product tightly, his many, many ignoble deaths in Tekken washed away as the claw machine lights dance in front of them. He’s very taken with it, seemingly not caring that the cherry-red lips from his Slurpee and the badly-sewn sloth totally ruin his image as a devil-may-care delinquent. Or prince? The script is not stable, ah.
Tall, handsome, and reserved Yue Fei spends the rest of his tickets buying a ribbon to wrap around the ugly sloth’s neck. Sleek, gorgeous, and friendly Wei Qing spends the rest of his much more modest tickets to buy…
Ah, it seems he can only buy a little monkey eraser? Scam arcade! He still shoves it in Yue Fei’s hands.
Yue Fei very carefully places it in the depths of his pockets, regretting he’s not wearing his typical suit jacket. This little love token, his first from Wei Qing… his first-ever… it would be better to carry it in his inner pocket. To keep it absolutely secure. They leave the arcade in soft moods.
Wei Qing vacillates between complaining and pointing out landmarks as they walk through the bustling night market that conveniently extends through the entertainment district, from the old arcade all the way to the antique fence of the stone-banked river.
“If you just look at tickets, we’re really not that far apart.”
“Yes, it was anyone’s game.”
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.
“Right! Really, the big win is this guy, and you got him by feeding endless bills into the machine. So really~” Wei Qing smiles like he’s attained enlightenment, right outside a shop that jailbreaks phones and sells idol cases. “Really! This is being a whale! Finally, I’m on the other side of the pay-to-win debate, how refreshing!”
‘Whale’ Yue Fei dares public censure to kiss Wei Qing’s hair. Wei Qing squeezes his pinkie finger and mutters something that sounds a lot like, “Mmm, eating the rich makes sense. So good-looking.” Yue Fei chuckles all the way to the barbecue stall. To him, it looks exactly the same as a dozen others, but according to ‘expert delinquent’ Wei Qing, this particular one stands out. Somehow.
—
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Look, he really had come here once upon a time! But barbecue uncles from once-a-quarter trips with your brother a decade past don’t really stick out. It’s the same with stocks. Even back in time, he doesn’t remember shit except for general trends and personal embarrassments. No going against the sky and making his own fortune to counterattack here. One, so much work. Two, no ability.
Now you want to know which nightclub is going to be raided in roughly what year? Maybe. What singer that he already warned who sure enough ended up getting videotaped using a different type of microphone? Yeah. Good places to eat and invest? Not so much.
He squeezes his sloth with his thighs to keep the little guy from getting dirtied and eats the steaming skewers while carefully exiting the webpage that had all the vendors ranked on a convenient AR map. The food is good, the environment is novel enough to distract, but there’s still a silence that Wei Qing fears, and a tightness that slowly creeps into Yue Fei’s eyes, when he sees the gray beard of some old uncle in linen drinking tea.
Wei Qing excuses himself to the bathroom and pulls a waiter in for a hurried conversation.
Then?
Then, nothing.
Second Master Wei, whose penthouse is worth more than the development rights of this entire block, and whose ‘delinquent’ clothes are all name-brand, grabs his wall-eyed sloth and his staring boyfriend and dines and dashes. Shamelessly. He runs and laughs, the barbecue uncle raises a cleaver and shouts, the elders sitting on their stoops and selling small wares all tut about the decay of society and young men with good looks and no morals.
Sure enough, it brings Yue Fei back to the present. Wei Qing, especially in motion, is simply too eye-catching for any old ghosts to squeeze in. Even though running is pretty much his only exercise, his cheeks still flush so quickly, and his short little exhalations are arresting.
They run into an alley and hide behind a cannibalized phone booth and a stack of recyclable cardboard. No one chases. Why would they, for a few yuan worth of barbecue? Especially since, as soon as they turned the corner, the stall owner himself just chuckled and returned to his chopping board.
Yue Fei steps into assistant mode.
“Wei Qing, did you lose your wallet?” Yue Fei is successfully distracted, but also confused. Even when he had troublesome vices, Wei Qing was always open-handed with money. He once saw a child crying while waiting for the bus and gave the kid’s mom his fucking car keys. He was high out of his mind at the time, and the very honest lady refused and settled for cab fare instead, but still. He really would have just laughed the next day if his car was gone with a toddler. Might have even smirked at the trouble that the registration issues would cause for Wei Qiwan and do it again in a fit of pique.
Dine and dash really wasn’t his style.
Wei Qing beams at him and steals a misbehaving kiss while they’re hidden from the eyes of passersby. He doesn’t let go until Yue Fei responds, nipping at his lips in something that would be called chastisement if he wasn’t holding him so very carefully.
“Nope. But our delinquent score was falling.”
“I’ll go back and pay.” Even if it’s his wrong, Yue Fei isn’t willing to let others judge Wei Qing. Better for him to resolve it and pretend that he’s the one who- Wei Qing cuts off his obvious thoughts with a warm laugh and a quick peck of his bicep.
“We can go back together.” Wei Qing runs his fingers through his run-mussed hair. “Just a bit of fun, don’t worry so much.”
With no worries or shame, Wei Qing strolls back, one hand swinging the sloth and the other fishing out a small palm-sized notebook from his back pocket. Very at ease, so much so that Yue Fei’s sure there’s a play hidden here, and his worry is replaced with amused curiosity.
“Ai, there they are. Going back, admitting wrongs, tut. At least there’s still some education.” The idle elders nod at them as they return.
Wei Qing smiles toothily at the granny and winks as the lady with the stoop and the orange-peel face waves him off with a bamboo fan. The soft rebukes of easily-flattered elders become the background track of their not-quite walk of shame. All the way to the overflowing barbecue uncle, who looks up with a little bit of pig blood on his forearms.
“Ah? Back already? Got what you need for your little script?”
Wei Qing nods and shifts his shoulders. Others wouldn’t notice, but Yue Fei has personal experience. This is Wei Qing getting into roleplay mode. Against his will, Yue Fei’s thoughts start to turn to imperial palaces. It’s probably Pavlovian. But they’re in public, so…
He coughs and rubs the little monkey eraser in his pocket.
“Yep! Thanks so much to the owner! Good food and I really think I captured the script. After all, all those films make it seem so serious, but I think this casual chiding and indifference is truer to life.”
“Script?” Yue Fei takes the bait.
“Mmm. You know my next film? Think about it, an entertainment story mixed with the redemption of a failing family, a bodyguard with no bottom line, and a young master who grows into power and face slaps the world. A common story, but these little bits of reality should refresh it, no?”
Wei Qing very seriously flips through his notebook, as if reading script revisions. Yue Fei can clearly see that the pages are blank. He coughs to cover up his laugh at Wei Qing’s unrivaled ability to spin bullshit.
Really quick-witted and adorable. If he didn’t know better, he’d really think Wei Qing was debating debuting as a scriptwriter. After all, he certainly has the foundation and understands the trends of popular media, especially amongst the romantics. Just like this, Yue Fei is pulled into the distraction of Wei Qing’s flawless conversion of their delinquent date into ‘movie scouting,’ being pulled along and teased and entertained by Wei Qing’s endless energy for taking him to so many common places, always with an uncommon twist.
At the innocent and childish arcade, they were delinquents in name only.
At the excellent barbecue stall, they were script researchers trying out method acting to ‘get the feel of it.’
At the walk-up bar where they stop for a single drink, they talk nonsense about the boxing match on TV and pretend to be rough men of the world, even though pretty much everything can only be attributed to Baidu.
At the KTV, Wei Qing is finally exhausted enough to go ahead and be a young master again. Although he also pretends Yue Fei is one, pulling him in and laughing about imaginary mergers and the kind of business intrigues that the proprietor is long-used to using as a weathervane for which caliber of waitstaff he should send to the room.
Even though Wei Qing very diligently chooses a clean KTV, flirting is just flirting, and pretty people saying pretty words is inevitable.
He leans against the padded purple wall and raises an eyebrow at the extremely deferential manager and the flashes of pretty young faces he sees behind the curtain. Ah, really a bit like the household manager and the beauties of the harem. But Wei Qing is very particular in his approach to flipping tiles. After all, he already has a shadow guard at home.
He smiles like a lazy cat, and idly pulls at Yue Fei’s shirt, showing the good relationship between them and casually warning off the most mercenary of the young go-getters in white and black uniforms.
“Manager Su, my friend and I are a little bored, ah~” Wei Qing pulls out a black card and lazily slides it across the counter like a hockey puck. “Sweet is too saccharine, smart is too presumptuous, and I know Manager doesn’t let those dirtier hearts in his store– ah, Manager Su, we’ll go in first. For something different, how about you send your least profitable server?”
“?”
Manager Su runs the card to open up his best room, unlocks the whole song catalog, and only then realizes what the young master means. What odd tastes. But one look at the serious eyes of the silly one and the pampering looks of the tall one, and Manager Su can tell it’s not a joke. After all, he’s very good at his job. You have to be, to keep profits in a clean KTV when there’s so much filthy competition. So he smiles and nods and earnestly follows orders that go against common sense. Who knows, maybe one really can get bored of diligence?
City people have always known how to play, after all. His mom had warned him when he came here twenty years ago, and the decades had proven Mama’s wisdom.
As long as nothing illegal happens, there’s no reason not to send up their resident wooden child. Even if the young masters probably only want to disdain the girl, she’s got good psychological quality. And since the young master directly paid for their best service, even if the girl can’t upsell, Manager Su won’t take a loss on it.
—
Although Yue Fei has many rich experiences from following Wei Qing, this is one of the few times that he’s been in such a place and the first where it’s just him and Wei Qing. Where he sits on the couch and feels his boyfriend’s legs hook up over his as he cycles through the song options.
Much nicer than his initial impression.
Paying money to sit in a dark box and consume overpriced snacks and badly sing old songs is ridiculous. But Yue Fei is kind of looking forward to it.
After all, although Wei Qing isn’t much for the campus love story, he’s still seen a few in the months that they’ve been hermits. And how often is the first spark of attraction or even the relationship confirmed on these kinds of couches and in these kinds of late-night haunts?
The progression is a little backward, but Yue Fei still keenly feels Wei Qing’s intentions.
Not just to distract him from those newly peeled wounds, but to give him the experiences that he missed out on. Only…
He really, truly, can’t sing. Not in front of an audience, not in the shower, not even in front of Wei Qing who is looking at him, so excited to share this sort of thing. Yue Fei is about to force himself, never mind the discomfort and his own totally unpracticed style, when Wei Qing bounces closer to him and pops a peanut into his mouth.
“Ah, why do you look like you’re approaching the gallows? If you don’t want to, don’t force yourself.”
Yue Fei swallows and touches the hidden monkey eraser again.
“You took time to plan this.”
“So?” Wei Qing bites his shoulder and leans back, the tiredness that they’ve been chasing finally starting to settle around his shoulders. “Yue Fei… you’re allowed to have preferences. I won’t feel like a real boyfriend if you’re always giving way. That’s what you do for a boss, not a lover.”
Yue Fei lattices their hands together and processes this new not-boundary. It makes sense, of course it does, but it still feels ungrateful and wrong, to not want something that Wei Qing is offering– Wei Qing is so lovely and bright and talented and joyous, how can Yue Fei possibly rain on his parade? Is that really okay?
Advice for a different situation pops into his head:
You can control this, just like he can.
Yue Fei looks at Wei Qing, who genuinely seems more worried about the prospect of him giving in than any failure of karaoke, and figures… It’s probably worth trusting his boyfriend. After all, Wei Qing is always refreshing his expectations. If he says it’s okay to say no, it… probably is. Even if it feels wrong, he can get past the wrongness.
Yue Fei thinks back to a thousand nights, with dozens of concerts where he stood in the background like a diligent potted plant. He fishes out his phone and makes his first ever non-work app store purchase, for a glowstick emulator and flashes it at his lounging boyfriend, a little hesitant, a little hopeful.
“My singing is… similar to a goat being butchered, but I can be A’Qing’s fanclub?”
A’Qing shows off his lovely voice by screaming into a pillow.
Yue Fei diligently turns the glowstick to turquoise and gives dry praise, like ‘Idol Wei screams the best!’ and ‘Idol Wei hiding his face makes me want to have monkeys’ and many, many other silly things that he happened to read a few months ago when he was trying to prepare himself for Wei Qing’s theoretical entry into the live-streaming industry. After all, with Wei Qing’s refreshing (death-seeking) playstyle, if he’d actually done it, Yue Fei really would have had to spend all his time hopping from trumpet to trumpet and organizing water armies into the ‘braindead fan’ formation.
When ‘Least Profitable Server’ TongTong finally gets up the courage to face whatever kind of bully wants someone displeasing in their booth, what she finds is the results of such teasing:
One very handsome man, red as a tomato, squatting at the far end of the booth and throwing pillows at an almost-as-handsome man sitting and waving his phone while reciting braindead praise like he’s reading out the core values of Socialism.
It looks like the honored guests have yet to order a single song.
Ah, looking at it this way, maybe the unique brothers just didn’t want to drag the quota of the top sellers? That’s nice of them.
When the two men finally turn to her, TongTong puts on her best (still too wooden) smile and passes over drink menus while trying to find an appropriate phrase from their binder of ‘Cute Slogans for Customers!’ There really aren’t any for this kind of situation though. So she just defaults to goldfish mode, repeating the most common one:
“Boss has such a good singing voice, can really be a star!”
Oh.
Wait.
It seems there hasn’t been any singing yet? Huh. Maybe Manager Su is right and she really should consider a non-customer-facing job? Her auntie at the funeral hall did say that if she didn’t mind the hours, she could be an attendant there… And she does like the pretty white flowers…
The handsome one with the glow stick nods and brings her back from her considerations of job-hopping.
“See? Idol Wei already has a second fan. What momentum.”
TongTong ends up delivering many soft drinks and virgin cocktails and no small amount of small plates of foods, but the handsome man’s glowstick never disappears, and the other handsome one never seems to gain immunity to the surreal praise of his ‘fan club,’ whether the praise is about the singing he finally engages in or the way he eats carrots. (‘Idol Wei makes carrots look so cool. Insert sticker pack here.’)
Walking home with a tip that equals her entire upsells for the quarter, TongTong can only conclude that she ran into two aliens that were attempting to learn about human customs. Ah, if they’re learning from her, the brothers at the black sites are definitely going to catch them back for study soon enough.
She sends a text to her auntie after all… Dead people are less troublesome than KTV visitors.
Author’s Corner:
Screw it! I had a date chapter already lined up and this is the 5/20-5/21 weekend, I refuse to be silenced!
Sometimes, being dumb and cute is the best medicine.
Best of luck with the dead, TongTong!
… is it bad that I wanna vote for TongTong somehow coming back?? Even if it’s just a cameo to recite lines as ‘Idol Wei’s 2nd fan’? Also their date is so sweet I’m gonna need a cup of coffee now to wash down the sugar 😉
There’s something about this chapter that made me physically unable to stop smiling as I read it
Same! I just love these boys!
They terrified the poor girl lmao
Thank for sharing this absolutely delightful date chapter.
And TongTong is clearly made to be a fan favorite lol.
The blank pages in the notebook, the sloth and the glow stick app pretty much made the whole night for me 😂. Tong Tong’s career change was a bonus – and probably a wise choice.
Everything was so nice. Totally took notes. Full of shenanigans Idol Prince Delinquent Wei is indeed my favourite ever. I laughed, had heavy second-hand embarrassment (the alien part killed me) and almost blushed at the niceness of it.
Thank you for the chapter 🍡
this was so damn cute! I just want to join in the brain dead fan silliness!
thanks for the chapter <3
Insert sticker pack here.🤣😂
This! Is! The! Best! Dating! Scene! Ever!
Loved (and laughed😆) so much!
💖💖💖