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Whenever Chen Yi pictures Ai Di, he still remembers his cheeks flushed with firelight, his messy dark hair raked back, and his eyes fanned closed.

He would always make a big show out of bowing his head over his clasped hands and making a wish, and then he would inevitably pop one sly eye open to check that Chen Yi was following his lead.

“Come on, man,” he would say. “A shitty life like ours? We gotta take every wish we can get.”

“It’s not all shitty,” Chen Yi would say. And then he would wrangle Ai Di under his arm and smear frosting all over his annoying little face.

It had taken a long time for them to be so cavalier with food, and with each other. 

They’d barely let their guards down for long enough to celebrate their first birthday together. In amongst the upheaval of their strange new life, the richness of cupcakes and candles felt like a cruel trick. Chen Dong Yang didn’t know how to be a caretaker, let alone a parent, and scraping their birthdays together into a one-and-done affair seemed to be as much warmth as he could muster. The Yiyun alliance didn’t have daycares, or nannies, or fathers, or mothers. 

In those days Ai Di’s fist was usually clenched tight in Chen Yi’s sleeve, his dark, serious eyes peering solemnly out from his baby face. They were orphans, adopted into a danger that they might one day inherit, and they could not afford to misbehave. 

So they bowed and thanked the gathered family, and then, mechanically, ate what had been offered to them. It was only when they were back in their room that Ai Di produced a lighter and half-burned candle that he’d stolen from the party, and his clumsy kid fingers fought with the spark until it caught.

“Okay, now make your wish, Ge,” he had whispered in the darkness, and Chen Yi had smiled.

“Why didn’t you make one before?”

Ai Di made an exaggerated pffft sound, like maybe he’d heard it done on TV. “With everyone watching? No. I’m not a baby.”

“You look like one to me,” Chen Yi prodded, and Ai Di rose to the bait instantly, waving the candle under Chen Yi’s nose close enough to singe, purposefully jabbing his bony elbows into the tender flesh of his thighs. At seven years old, he was already very precise about hurting people. It was a good thing he was so tiny.

“Shut up,” he said, incensed. “You’re barely that much older than me. Shut up.”

Chen Yi plucked the candle from his hand and then hip checked him across the bed. Ai Di yelped and grabbed the duvet cover on his way to the ground.

“You’re a bully,” Ai Di hissed, when his ruffled head popped up from the far side of the mattress.

“You’re the violent one,” Chen Yi told him. “You’re just too easy to throw around.”

“I’m just a kid.”

“You just said—“

Ai Di swiped at his face, manually pinching Chen Yi’s lips closed before he shook free from his grip, sputtering. The candle flickered in the struggle, and a bead of wax went flying somewhere into the blackness of their bedroom.

“Enough,” he said. “Make your wish.”

“You first,” Ai Di prompted. He was starting to gnaw his own sleeve: a self-soothing habit that softened Chen Yi’s heart whenever he noticed it.

“Okay,” he agreed, after a beat. He cradled the tiny orange flame, and his heart panged unexpectedly. “Should I wish for our families to—come back?” he asked quietly.

Ai Di scoffed. “Don’t waste your wish on that. They’re dead, and they can’t come back.” He said it so matter-of-factly, like Chen Yi couldn’t see how the candle wobbled in his fist.

“I know. I thought maybe you’d want to pretend.” Other kids their age played pretend, he knew.

A skeptical look. “What’s the point of that?”

“What’s the point of wishing in the first place?”

“It’s not about believing crazy stuff’ll come true, dummy. Only little kids think that. It’s about asking for what you want, so maybe someone gives it to you.”

Chen Yi looked at him hard. Surprised as always by how little Ai Di resembled a child in anything but appearance.

“I want my own room,” Chen Yi said finally. “And I want to go on a mission.” A job, the Boss called it. Chen Yi didn’t know exactly what ‘jobs’ consisted of, except that they happened after all the boring meetings were finished, and that they were dangerous and important.

Ai Di swallowed this wish silently, and extended the candle in Chen Yi’s direction. He blew it out, momentarily plunging them both into darkness. And then Ai Di was flicking the lighter again, easier this time, and relighting the nearly-gone wax stump.

“I wish that we would always share a birthday,” Ai Di said. He must have had his wish cued up the whole time they’d been shoving this flame back and forth between them. “I like having a holiday that’s about you and me. We should be celebrated for a change. We’re awesome.”

Something stirred in Chen Yi’s chest. Sometimes he could tell, even at ten years old, that whatever he said to Ai Di in some moments really mattered. That he was setting the tone for the rest of his life, like a parent would.

“Well that’s not a wish,” Chen Yi said confidently. “That’s gonna happen.”

Ai Di’s face, lined so slightly in dancing warm light, curled in pleased surprise.

“Do you promise?”

Chen Yi offered his pinky, and Ai Di hooked it readily in his own. “I promise. Who else is there, huh? It’s always gonna be you and me, as long as we’re alive.”

And for the next seven years, it was.

They were sworn brothers. Chen Yi took his promise seriously, even when Ai Di increasingly flouted the rules and put himself in danger, like he was trying to die young and bow out of their agreement by default. 

They learned to fight together, learned to take each other’s punches long before anyone else’s. Somehow, Ai Di became a scrapper, a pit viper, growing naturally into his bad attitude. He was vicious, ill-tempered, and exceptionally tough, and Chen Yi trusted him implicitly with his back. 

It didn’t feel like leaving his life in a kid’s hands, even when he was sixteen, and Ai Di was a gaunt thirteen-year-old with bloody knuckles. His voice was only just breaking, and he probably weighed about as much as a german shepherd. But everything was different with Ai Di; logic didn’t apply to him.

He was someone who had been scarred so young that he healed a little crooked. They had that in common, although they dealt with it in opposite ways: Chen Yi became reserved and solemn, pouring his rage into progress; Ai Di became loud, unserious, and ruled by impulse.

But he was also curious, passionate, a quick study, and a bleeding heart, although he tried hard to hide those soft, secret parts of himself.

Also, somewhere along the way, he had become a menace.

Chen Yi doesn’t know where to draw the line with him, because, well, he’s not his real brother. He has no say in what he wears, how much he smokes, or who he kisses.

It is bizarre though, when Ai Di comes home blond. And then pierced. And then collared. He’s finding himself. It’s almost sort of cute, his burgeoning little gangster persona.

Meanwhile, Chen Yi garners more and more responsibility as he creeps towards eighteen. He’s had a clear mission for a long time: impress the Boss, take charge of his own branch of the family, and climb out of the sinkhole he was born in. It’s his only path, the only way out, the only way through. And for fuck’s sake, he’s not leaving Ai Di behind. Even when he’s being a shithead and getting in the way. He’s Chen Yi’s responsibility first.

He just doesn’t understand him anymore.

It’s terrifying, sometimes, being his protector. If nothing else because he seems to have started resenting the way Chen Yi cares for him. It’s painful. He often thinks of his small pinky in his own.

Chen Yi is half in love with the job, with good, clean crime, with the network that pulses around him like family, with the Boss, their saviour, their caretaker, their reason. 

And Ai Di is more into—backhanding people for looking at him wrong, spending his allowance on jewellery and weapons, partying at the bar with a crowd that doesn’t know how young he is, drinking himself to the brink of death on a Wednesday afternoon. Burying himself in a personality so perfectly neon that no one ever squints past the glare and sees his picked pinky, his wet eyes.

He’s fun, of course, in a terrible way, and he teases Chen Yi like he always does. He also holds him accountable, pursues information like a dog, and scraps like one too. He couldn’t do any of this without him. 

And they’re still best friends, even though their last birthday had ended with Ai Di deep in his cups, crossfaded on booze and weed at the tender age of fourteen. Chen Yi had crept away to whisper on the phone to the Boss out on their balcony, and at one point he’d looked up through the glass and locked onto Ai Di’s dark eyes. Not passed out after all. For a bizarre moment he hadn’t been able to break eye contact or respond to Boss, who was still needling about their next meeting, sweet in his ear.

Ai Di is just—once you started, it was very hard to look away from him. 

He’s candy-striped and bubbly like a science project is bubbly, like something’s about to erupt.

About forty percent of Chen Yi’s brain power is always devoted to him. Where is he? Is he safe? Is he hurting? Does he need to be saved? Stopped? When Chen Yi finds him, scoops him out of danger, will he be met with his favourite toothy grin, the old crowing laughter, or will he be met with scorn, a cruel joke, a brush-off so complete that it compels Chen Yi to drop him? He’s obsessed with finding out. No—he has to find out, because he has to intervene if things go south. 

It doesn’t matter what Ai Di thinks of him, not like it does with Boss. He doesn’t need Ai Di’s approval, he needs him alive.

But still.

He keeps at least one man on Ai Di’s detail at all times, just in case. He’s a wild card, and Chen Yi is too busy to be keeping a constant eye on him like he used to.

One night Xiao Jie calls him and sheepishly warns him that Ai Di is being pursued, and he doesn’t elaborate.

Panic spikes in his stomach. Pursued how? By whom? He’s already grabbing his keys. He was supposed to be setting up a meeting with a supplier, but it can wait. Everything can wait. His mind is already clouding with images of Ai Di being chased through the street, Ai Di tied up, bloody, someone else touching him—

He races to the bar where Ai Di spends all his time lately, fingers ticking against the steering wheel, windshield wipers working overtime in a sudden downpour. He double-parks haphazardly at the entrance, throwing open the driver’s side door and nodding decisively at the bouncer on his way inside.

The air is smoky, liquor-soaked, and humid with body heat. People are swaying and grinding under the coloured lights, pealing with laughter, some of them doing shots or lines, some of them hooking up. He hates that this is where Ai Di spends all his time. 

He spins and searches, doing a quick and dirty perimeter, and it is with a huge and terrible jolt that he realizes one of the couples tangled together on a couch in the back corner is Ai Di and some—guy.

He blinks at the picture Ai Di makes, kissing someone.

He hadn’t known he was gay. He hadn’t thought about it at all actually. He—he—

Ai Di’s mouth is bitten red when he gasps away from this stranger’s lips, and his bleached hair is being grabbed like a leash, and there are fingers hooking in the ring of his choker, at the hollow of his throat, and Chen Yi is so fucking—so livid he can’t breathe.

He’s upon them in an instant, and he wastes a moment feeling gratified that Ai Di’s hazy eyes snap up to meet him immediately. His arms are lazy around the guy’s neck, his acid green cardigan pushed off halfway, pooling around his elbows.

Chen Yi hoists him out from under the stranger, and gathers him close by his hot, bare waist, where his shirt has been rucked up. The touch is like a static shock. He looks down at the guy who’s rolled over to look at them, shellshocked, wiping his mouth.

“What the hell, man?”

“Don’t fucking touch him,” Chen Yi hears himself say. His lips feel bloodless. He’s barely holding himself back from strangling the life out of this guy, who has a nose ring, and a hard-on, and is probably like nineteen.

“Can I help you?” Ai Di is saying, raspy, twisting in his grip. “I’m busy.”

“Shut up,” Chen Yi says calmly. He’s still looking at the stranger. “Did you hear what I said?”

His eyes dart nervously between them. “Sure. Whatever. Didn’t know he was taken.”

The implication is insane; his stomach swoops. He ignores it.

“He is not,” Ai Di snaps. “Excuse my brother, he’s a killjoy. What, you can’t get laid, so no one can?” he taunts. 

Chen Yi has had enough of this conversation. He drags Ai Di out of the bar, and very studiously does not think about how he’s flushed and ruffled and unbalanced in the circle of his arms. They duck into the rain, music throbbing behind them, and instantly get doused in the monsoon. It should break whatever bizarre, furious spell he’s under, but it doesn’t. When they get to the car, he wedges Ai Di into the backseat.

“Stay.”

“I’m not your dog.”

“I know that. Dogs are obedient.”

“Fuck you. You’re never around, and when you do decide to show up, it’s to cockblock me? Some friend you are.”

Chen Yi slams the door so he doesn’t think about the word cockblock in Ai Di’s mouth.

He throws himself behind the steering wheel, glancing up into the rearview and catching the tail end of Ai Di palming himself through his jeans.

He looks away quickly, but the damage is done. He flushes with embarrassment, hot up to his ears.

It’s—they’re teenagers. It’s not weird. What was weird was Ai Di’s choice of hook-up. He didn’t like the age gap, the slimy look of his hands around his neck.

“You’re—“ he starts, but his voice is a wreck. He tries again. “You’re too young for him.”

“Oh, please,” Ai Di says. He can’t look at him again. “I wasn’t gonna let him fuck me. I was bored, and he had a tongue piercing. Got it?” He says this last part in English.

No, actually. He gets very little right now.

“Guys like that take advantage of guys like you.”

Ai Di is dangerously silent. He risks another glance in the rearview mirror and notices that his white graphic t-shirt is translucent from the rain. He looks away again, mind carefully blank.

“And what kind of guy am I?” Ai Di asks lowly. It’s one of those moments, where Chen Yi feels like his answer really, really matters. Like it’ll make a difference. Except he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say, can’t even make a guess. He’s so keyed up and angry, still.

“I don’t know—pretty. Or—smaller than him.”

It’s a miserably wrong thing to say. He can feel ice spreading between them.

“Because you seem to have sustained some sort of brain damage, I’ll remind you,” Ai Di says, at length. “I can take care of my self. I know I’m ever so pretty, but I still have functional fucking hands.” He surges forward and yanks Chen Yi back by the hair. “And I’ll beat you to death with them, if you even think about treating me like some clueless little twink.”

He releases him with a shove, and snaps the side door open, sliding out into the storm before he can even register what’s happening.

It’s a long, heart-pounding minute before Chen Yi realizes, with a jolt, that he’s hard.

Something happens in his head after that, an elaborate all-systems shut-down. He doesn’t acknowledge it. 

When he’s drunk, and he does let himself think about it, possible reasonings for his flash-in-the-pan arousal are numerous. He’d been adrenaline-twisted. He’s young, and he’d just been doused in the sexual debauchery of a nightclub with no real rules. He’d conflated protectiveness with possessiveness. He’d been thinking about someone else.

After all, he’s already knee-deep in his own sexual awakening. A heady shiver of power and approval pulses through him just like lust whenever Boss calls him, only him, when he holds him back and talks low and close into Chen Yi’s ear.

He loves him—Chen Dong Yang, king of their universe, arbiter of desires and maker of rules. He’s always going to be in charge of Chen Yi, and his whole constellation of feelings.

But of course he is still, as always, set on keeping Ai Di safe. That’s not really a variable that can change.

The sound of light footsteps trailing behind Chen Yi, keen eyes on the side of his face, are some of the only constants in his life. His little shadow. They know each other in a way that would be impossible to manufacture with someone else, because their link was forged in fire and blood, a matching brand on both of them. Of course he feels something—extra towards him. 

He knows Ai Di’s little fidgets when he’s trying to pretend not to care, his precise weight in his arms, the look when he's about to bolt. And Ai Di knows Chen Yi in return, his tastes, his weaknesses. He even knows about Chen Yi’s crush on the Boss, clocked it from minute one, and became relentless about pointing it out, questioning it, cheapening it.

Boss’s approval is all that matters to Chen Yi in the world, and isn’t that love? 

What he has with Ai Di—lived-in compatibility, scolding worry, the absolute knowledge that they would die for each other, their habit of sharing loaded eye contact when the chips are down—that’s a consequence of surviving together for so long. 

It’s not attraction. Because he knows that he wants Boss. Because love is something that you have to earn, fundamentally. And with Ai Di it’s not earned, it’s just there. They’re family. 

He’s aware that Ai Di is some people’s type. Many people, actually, as the following years will confirm, again and again, when he finds Ai Di in someone’s lap, or ogled by some pervy older brother from a connected family, or passed out in a strange bed, bruised from chin to collarbone. 

He feels something about it. (Murderous.)

It’s another thing he has to worry about, mostly. Ai Di is too liberal with his feelings, with his body. He projects rage and delight, invites violence and attracts desire and doesn’t seem to care which he gets.

Chen Yi throws himself into work. 

Increasingly, Boss tells him exactly what he needs to hear, while Ai Di only ever spits venom his way, drags his most vulnerable feelings out like roadkill for everyone to look at. The choice is simple.

Ai Di refuses to come to their birthday dinner at the compound, Chen Yi’s eighteenth birthday, which stings, but he understands that relationships evolve. They’re not kids anymore. It’s okay, because Boss even sings for him, pours him a double whiskey, and clinks glasses like they’re equals. 

(Ai Di’s young, candlelit face smiles softly at him from his memory when he lies down to sleep that night.)

Sometimes, Chen Yi will hear word on the wind of Ai Di causing trouble, and he’ll surface from the intoxicating world that the Boss is threading him into like a needle. It’s hard to extricate himself from his duties these days. It’s hard to keep watching Ai Di disappearing out the door, clearly trying to leave their friendship behind.

He’s changing into someone who uses violence as a crutch, someone who’s grieving something invisible without Chen Yi’s help. Vengeance and loss ache in his eyes. Sometimes Chen Yi looks at his turned back, and his ears roar and he thinks, look at me. Look at only me. I know you. Come back to me.

Fan Ze Rui arrives then, handsome and shrewd and annoyingly good-hearted despite the challenging rival family he comes from.

Ai Di likes him. It pisses Chen Yi off (even though he likes him as well. He’s hard not to like).

He keeps finding them laughing and scheming and eating together. Rui cooks for him. Ai Di drapes himself all over him when he’s drunk, grabbing at his hand and tucking his head beneath Rui's chin.

They spend another birthday apart, and when he comes back to the garage after midnight, he finds Rui rubbing Ai Di’s back as he throws up in the kitchen sink.

There’s a red velvet cake on the counter next to the fridge, with at least two pieces missing. Sixteen. Nineteen.

He’s yanked Rui back by the collar before he’s aware of what he’s doing.

“I’ll take over.” He makes himself say it calmly.

“No need,” Rui says, waving him off. “I got him like this, so I can take responsibility.” He ruffles Ai Di’s messy hair fondly. “You know I didn’t know until tonight that he was only sixteen? The alliance sure is taking ‘em young these days.”

Everything about this rubs Chen Yi the wrong way for some reason. Ai Di’s head is lolling out of the sink onto his outstretched arm. He’s craned over the counter, face flushed, hair damp.

“Now you know. Leave. Please.”

Rui examines him for a bruising moment, annoyingly perceptive.

“You’re really protective of him, huh?”

“He’s my responsibility.” It’s a well-worn phrase, broken-in like soft leather.

“Well yeah. And you love him.”

Chen Yi shoots him a perturbed look, unsure of what he’s getting at, and goes to Ai Di.

“If I pick you up are you going to puke?” he murmurs. Ai Di’s face screws up, kind of sweetly, half-asleep.

“No. I’m fine. Normal,” he says, garbled. Chen Yi bites on a smile as he ropes him up against his chest.

“He cares about you a lot too, you know,” Rui says from behind him.

“Don’t,” Ai Di moans.

“I know,” Chen Yi says, confused. “We’ve known each other our whole lives.”

He moves towards the doorway with Ai Di squirming against him, and it feels so right, caring for him. He misses what they used to have so terribly sometimes, never more than when Ai Di is pressed against him like this.

“Be careful with him,” Rui warns, and Chen Yi has had enough, actually.

He rounds on him. “Don’t tell me how to take care of my—“ he flounders for a moment. Why does the word brother feel wrong—not enough? “Of what’s mine,” he finishes, awkwardly.

Rui raises his hands and physically backs off, probably sensing the depth of the hot water he’s in.

“Okay, got it. You know I’m just trying to look out for you both. Happy birthday, anyways.”

Chen Yi nods just once, and decides to stop caring about Rui for the rest of the night, as a treat. He clutches his best friend to his chest as he crosses the garage floor, nudging the red door to their apartments open with his foot. He creeps into Ai Di’s room, messy and dimly lit with the amber salt lamp on his bedside table.

He lays him down carefully in his rumpled bed, and watches as he twists onto his stomach, nuzzling the side of his face into a pillow, and the discarded hoodie that’s half-draped over it. Chen Yi’s hoodie, he realizes. His heart clenches painfully around a shard of some old, acute feeling. 

“Get out of my room,” Ai Di slurs.

Chen Yi sits down next to him and cards a hand through his tangled hair. “And let you aspirate and die? No.”

He groans. “Why d’you always think I’m gonna die?”

“You’re the most reckless person I know.”

Ai Di sighs. “What an honour. You’re the dumbest person I know.”

“I carried you to bed and you’re still insulting me?”

“You like when I insult you. Makes you feel alive.”

Chen Yi hums and doesn’t deny it. Ai Di opens one eye, and in the orange glow from the salt lamp, he looks like that seven-year-old with a wish.

And then he turns onto his back, shirt twisting, waistband slipping down one angular hipbone, and he does not look seven years old at all.

Chen Yi’s hand darts out and pulls his pants up to a more respectable level. Then, as if in a trance, he undoes the drawstring on his sweatpants so he can retie it properly. But before he gets that far, Ai Di has grabbed his wrist in his sweaty hand.

“What,” he says, looking suddenly dead sober, “are you doing?”

Chen Yi swallows a weird flare of panic down and pushes against his sternum, knocking him back flat. He makes quick work of the drawstring, looping it into a bow, focusing hard on not touching anything else.

“Making sure you don’t flash me. You’d kill me in the morning.”

Ai Di’s eyes are fathoms deep, and gold in the yolky lamplight.

“Why are you so… obsessed with my modesty?” he asks. And Chen Yi—doesn’t have an answer. “I don’t care if you see my junk.”

“I do,” Chen Yi says automatically. He jumps when he feels Ai Di’s hand fist in his shirt.

“Why? Afraid the Boss’ll get jealous?” he whispers. So fucking disrespectful all the time.

“Can we not talk about that for one night?” he snaps.

Ai Di pauses, and Chen Yi can see the signs of his mind whirring, trying to find something clever or off-putting to say. “One night, huh?” His hand goes flat against Chen Yi’s chest and slides up, a hot streak of friction. “And what should we do with our one night?”

“Shut up,” Chen Yi says, hearing the way his own voice has gone thin. “You’re drunk.”

“Ding ding ding, good job, you noticed something. Now c’mere.” He pulls at the back of Chen Yi’s neck as if to drag him further into bed and he—oh god, he panics, and breaks free from his grip, stumbling halfway across the bedroom.

Ai Di stares at him, and then he laughs crassly. “I really repulse you, don’t I?”

“You’re drunk,” Chen Yi reiterates.

“Yeah, well. I had a shit birthday.”

Chen Yi thinks of Ze Rui with malice. “You should’ve come out to headquarters for drinks.”

“I really, really shouldn’t have,” Ai Di says. And then he splays backwards, sort of pathetically uncoordinated, dragging loose blankets over his head. “Get out of my room,” he says again.

“Ai Di,” he starts.

“Your very first wish was for your own room, remember? You already wanted to get away from me. So go.”

“What?” His head is spinning. That’s not—that’s not right. He’s never wanted to get away from him, not unless he was pushed first. Why does nothing ever feel easy anymore. It’s like there’s something between them that he keeps tripping over.

“Don’t worry about it,” he murmurs. “Tomorrow everything’ll be business as usual. I’ll even crack some skulls for you, big bro.”

“I—okay.” He doesn’t know what else to say. Except, “happy birthday, Ai Di.”

The lump of Ai Di’s body beneath the covers doesn’t stir.

“We survived for another year,” Chen Yi tries.

“Yeah,” Ai Di says, finally. “We survived.”

Again, he finds himself with his arms full, and a pain in his chest that he doesn’t understand. They’re freshly eighteen and twenty-one, and he’s been chasing Ai Di down through the whole goddamn city after their argument outside the bar, only to find him getting fucked up with Rui again.

Rui, who has taken it upon himself to keep disappearing into the bed of a seventeen-year-old, as if that’s a normal thing to do in the middle of the war-zone Zhang Teng is making. Everything’s so messy lately. It’s all he can do to A) finagle a plan out of nothing, so Boss will see that he doesn’t need supervision, and B) keep Ai Di at arm’s length, so he can’t be volatile in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Rui is not helping. He’s especially not helping right now, having one of those cryptic, unsolicited conversations with Chen Yi where he looks meaningfully at Ai Di and says things like “love and worship are different. Think it through.”

What’s to think through? He tells Rui in no uncertain terms that he’s deflecting. Zong Yi is behind him looking painfully young but somehow standing his ground, and Chen Yi can tell that there’s already trust there, that they’re circling each other in a way that is inevitable.

He holds Ai Di to his chest and thinks about the vicious things they said earlier, and behind those almost involuntary spasms of cruelty, the glint of true hurt in Ai Di’s expression at being mistrusted, at being out of the loop, at being Chen Yi’s second choice. 

As if Chen Yi doesn’t come running to him every single time he needs him. As if he’s not here, cradling Ai Di’s head as he carries him down the stairs. As if he doesn’t love him so much that it’s a liability.

He buckles him into the passenger seat, and looks lingeringly down at his unguarded face. When Ai Di isn’t snapping, wriggling into his thoughts, tormenting him for information, leaping to violence, he is, unvarnished, Chen Yi’s favourite person. 

When he finds him dead drunk like this his bravado is all cleaned away, and he’s just the person that Chen Yi is sworn to protect. His constant. And he—feels good, hoisted into Chen Yi’s arms. Warm and safe. He should always be in Chen Yi’s arms; he can keep an eye on him that way.

“Don’t make me worry,” he scolds. He can’t stand it. Nothing feels more raw and painful than losing track of Ai Di in the wide, dangerous city. Losing him for good is the only thing that he’s not sure he would come back from.

He drives home, and thinks it through. He thinks about Boss, and he thinks about how much Ai Di hates him thinking about Boss. 

He goes to his tried and true fantasy of Boss seeing the good work he’s done, praising him, and rewarding him with plying kisses and a hand down his pants.

His mind offers him Ai Di’s mouth instead, his bitten bottom lip, obscene, pink. He thinks of his small hands, the way his fingers might look trying to circle his cock. 

His heart pounds. It’s so fucked up, but he finds a wave of heat rising in him, filling his chest like bathwater.

Helpfully, Ai Di makes a sound in his sleep, a small hitching sigh, and the bathwater gets into his head, his veins, his nervous system, and he can’t. He can’t. He can’t.

He has to stop thinking it through. Fuck Rui for doing this to him. Fuck Ai Di for having this grip on him that he can’t even try and shake. His jaws are locked in him like some kind of emotional crocodile. He’s being death-rolled.

He drives them home, carries Ai Di to bed, and tells himself that getting in after him is bad, and wrong. 

He’s eighteen now, his brain whispers, as if that means something.

He’s my brother. He’s my brother. He repeats it until he falls asleep, and then he dreams about that time that he untied Ai Di’s pants, only this time, he slides his hands inside.

He’s at the end of his rope.

Ai Di defies him, runs ahead and nearly gets people killed, and then he can be so fucking sweet with Rui, with the Boss, deferent, attentive, warm.

And—oh yeah—the Boss is lovingly preparing food for Ming Lei, and Rui is looking at the hot pot like Zong Yi himself is about to rise out of it, and Chen Yi is done. He’s done.

No one’s looking at him, so he gets wasted, just in case that helps. It doesn’t. He gets attention, but it’s indulgent at best and pitying at worst. The Boss puts his hand on Ming Lei’s hand, briefly, as he stands up to go to bed, and tells Rui and Ai Di to take good care of Chen Yi. The dismissal is… obvious.

He lets his friends drag him home, chattering busily over him like he’s not there. He takes a page from Ai Di’s rulebook and pretends to be asleep. He deserves to be alone forever, Ai Di says. Then, I would die with him. Then, if you want to stay alive, don’t be one of us.

It’s confusing, how Ai Di is talking about them like they’re still a unit. And he’s so painfully cavalier about death, he always has been. His parents were killed, he nearly followed them, and every day since then he’s treated as borrowed time. That’s why birthdays mean anything at all. Their survival is a marvel, those climbing numbers are a testament to their bond, without which they would surely be dead.

Chen Yi sighs, suddenly horizontal, sprawled in bed, hot then cold. What is he doing wrong? He wants Ai Di’s attention. He wants the Boss’s attention. Both. How do I get it? How do I get him? 

He says this last bit aloud, and whatever tender thing Ai Di had started doing to him gets immediately undone.

“You’re really drunk,” Ai Di’s voice floats down to find him. “Just be brave and tell him,” he says, with acid, like he means something he’s not saying. “If you can’t figure it out then learn from other people, it’s not that hard.”

Chen Yi’s chest constricts at his intentionally airy tone.

His whole ‘you’re a coward, your infatuation is pathetic’ routine is getting fucking tired. What would Ai Di possibly know. He’s a kid. He’s never been in love. Right? The thought of it is impossible.

“Who can I learn from?” he asks seriously, making himself sit up with some effort. “From you?” He snakes a hand out, quick, and gets a fistful of pants and shirt at once. He’s gratified to see Ai Di stumbling nearly on top of him, surprised. “You’re too young to understand this.”

And then Ai Di slithers right into the even more cruel and surreal thing he’s been doing lately, which is to make overtly sexual allusions about Chen Yi, to rile him up. 

It’s confusing. It’s so confusing. 

Why does he keep making their relationship about Chen Yi’s attraction to the Boss? 

“Are you proud of being a twenty-one year old virgin?” he crows. “Are you impotent?” he taps teasingly, suggestively, at Chen Yi’s body. 

And he—he’s not. Ai Di should stop running his mouth. 

He’s saying something else ugly, laughing at him, but Chen Yi is still stuck on the way he’s leaning over him, like he has all the power, and implying—

He shoves him back, overbalancing, so that he can box Ai Di all the way up against the window. He’s drunk, and confused, and, and—hot, but he feels a little more in control, a little more himself, looking down at Ai Di. 

He’s also so angry he can’t think straight. He dares Ai Di to say it again, to push him. He needs a reason. He needs Ai Di to force his hand. And because he knows Ai Di, he knows he won’t even hesitate.

“Wanna be scolded, huh? You’re impotent,” he repeats, with relish. “Can’t get hard. Impotent, impotent—“

He has to make him shut up, and he has to prove to him that he can, in no uncertain terms, get hard. So, two birds, one stone—he kisses him crushingly on the mouth. 

Take that, he thinks, for one shining moment. Like they’re kids again, and it’s as easy as this to win against Ai Di. Made you stop talking. 

What a perfect method to stop that smart mouth. He’s found it.

It doesn’t occur to him that there’s a reason this isn’t normally something they do, and that he’s just crossed an uncrossable line, until Ai Di bites down hard on Chen Yi’s lip, pushing him away with all his strength.

“What is wrong with you?”

He bounces back, disoriented, onto the mattress. Ripped from the heat of him, the wetness of his mouth, Chen Yi is stricken to find that Ai Di looks petrified.

God, god, why did he do that? 

All this time drawing lines in the sand, wrangling Ai Di out of his subconscious, trying to be the sane man between them, and he was the one who lost his mind and put his hands on Ai Di. 

Only to be rejected again. It’s all too awful.

“Get out,” he snaps, much too loud in the ringing silence. Ai Di trips to the door like a startled deer, escaping from this night that he already knows has changed them for good, leaving him to stew in it alone.

He checks his lip and finds it bloody; a puncture wound from Ai Di’s incisor.

No one ever draws blood like Ai Di does. 

He can’t believe he had half-convinced himself that Ai Di was into him. Rui had kept making little insinuations, and Ai Di was awfully pissed at him and no one else, and he’d never seen Ai Di interested in anyone, so, maybe…

He thinks of Ai Di, the brother, three years his junior, with a personality that blusters out ahead of him and gets him into scrapes. 

And then he thinks of this other Ai Di—mouth open beneath his, waistband clutched in his fist, throat flexing under his palm. Taunting him about love and sex every day, like some sort of demon. Making him jealous, making him worry.

What is Ai Di to him? He doesn’t fucking know. He kind of hates him right now. And through it all, he loves him.

He sits there for a long time, mouth bloody, remembering the satin of Ai Di’s choker under his hand, and beneath that, his rabbiting pulse.

Chen Yi is not taking this small victory for granted. 

It’s undeniable now that Ai Di cares about him. He was dressed in that ridiculous costume that meant he’d truly dropped everything at the slightest whiff of Chen Yi’s pain. He catches him, speeding bullet that he is, and holds him still. The silkiness of his cape, warmed by his body, feels good under Chen Yi’s hands. He likes it.

He knows Ai Di has been avoiding him since the incident, dodging his calls, escaping early in the morning and disappearing all day to do god knows what. Chen Yi has been balancing on the razor’s edge of panic for weeks, barking after his men to track him down, terrified that his drunken lapse in judgement had torn them apart for good.

But now he’s beside him, finally, and he’s not even really bothering to pretend they’re not friends.

Chen Yi likes how he looks with his hair wet and blond. It suits him. It’s distracting. He feels such renewed affection now that he knows Ai Di will still come running for him. 

He tries to push a little, to try and figure out what’s wrong with Ai Di lately. Why the secret undercover schtick? Is it for Rui? For Zong Yi, who is, after all, Ai Di’s age? Does he want to go back to school? But he gets shut down. Back to work. They only ever talk about business or fight about feelings. Why doesn’t Ai Di seem to trust him anymore? The kiss flashes in the back of his mind, and he tamps it down.

And why can’t Ai Di see himself? Later that same evening he makes this offhand comment about Zhang Teng being even crazier than him, and Chen Yi doesn’t like the implication at all.

Is that why he’s been souring lately? He can’t see his own nature anymore, without Chen Yi to remind him? His recklessness and repression must be clouding the way he cares fiercely about people, sacrifices himself at the slightest provocation, and always manages to rope people into having a good time. 

He has a violent streak, one that’s been exacerbated by all the neglect and betrayal in his life, but he’s not crazy. He’s not evil. He teases Rui like a brother. He flatters easily. He’s an imperfect liar. He’s affectionate when he’s drunk. He curls up to whatever smells like Chen Yi when he’s unconscious. He was orphaned and left and hurt over and over again, and his fierceness can be deadly. But he’s not crazy.

Chen Yi’s affection redoubles. 

He thinks of the kiss again. He looks at the back of Ai Di’s turned head and thinks about saying something.

And then his phone rings, and everything goes fantastically to shit.

Zhang Teng is killed, once and for all. Ze Rui is beaten half to death, and they can barely hold Zong Yi back from his bedside. It’s awful, the way he bows under the force of his own horror, alternating between unnervingly docile and furious with grief. 

Chen Yi can’t help but think that nothing in this world could keep him from Ai Di, if he was beaten the way Rui was beaten. He wouldn’t let him retreat into amnesia. He would drag him out of his subconscious by the ear.

But then all of that, all of his introspection and empathy and fear is obliterated, because the Boss shows up, and he grinds Chen Yi under his heel.

Next to him, Ai Di, corded with fury, whispers that the Fan family has most certainly caught wind of Zong Yi’s relationship with Ze Rui, and they’re forcing him to take the fall for the same crime that had so grievously injured them both. 

This injustice is Chen Yi’s fault, and he can’t stand it.

Neither can the Boss. He punches him squarely in the mouth, and says, “I’m very disappointed in you,” like some sort of cartoonish father figure from a bad dream.

Chen Yi starts drinking, and doesn’t stop.

He’s never, ever gotten drunk like this, lining them up like Ai Di always does, and he wonders if what he’s feeling is heartbreak.

The Boss is the only authority he’s ever cared to impress, and he hasn’t won his love, even after all this time trying. He let him down. He destroyed Zong Yi’s future, and got his friend badly hurt. He’s been too distracted lately, and it’s finally caught up to him. 

He races to the bottom of a two-six of whiskey, swilling it back and then getting the glass humid with his own tears. How is he still conscious? He wants to forget. He wants to die. He should ask Ai Di for something stronger.

And then, somehow, like he heard his thoughts, Ai Di is there with him, soothing as summer rain.

He wrests the tumbler from his hand and gets on his knees in front of him, holding him upright. It’s such a relief, not carrying it all. Hearing Ai Di try and ease the blame from his shoulders. 

But then he gets Chen Yi’s face in his hands, and he’s being so genuine. He looks so strangely hurt by what Chen Yi is doing to himself.

“When will you come to your senses? Wake up, will you? You see him as a god, he only sees you as his son. His son, do you understand? No matter how much you like him, no matter how hard you try, he will never look at you. You’ll never be the one he looks at. A fool like you—” He gazes at him, searching. His hands are the only thing keeping Chen Yi from collapsing in misery. Suddenly he knows what Ai Di is about to say, one second before he says it. 

“—only I would look at.” He seems so anguished about it. Something in Chen Yi’s chest bursts like overheated glass. He’s been letting Ai Di down too, all this time. 

“A fool like you,” he repeats. “Only me. Only I would look at you my entire life. I’m so stupid. I’m an idiot.” He struggles with himself for a beat, and Chen Yi can’t fucking stand it. He reaches for the liquor. “Ugh. Wake up!” Ai Di says, smacking him, struggling to wrangle his limbs. “Enough!”

The Ai Di in front of him is so clearly wounded. How as he been missing this? Of course he always drinks like he’s heartbroken. He is. He is.

And still he’s here trying to save Chen Yi from himself. And of course it burns, the truth about Boss, but he can’t even really think about that.

Because Chen Yi is very drunk, but he’s swallowing every word that’s being said to him. And they get sweeter, realer as they go along, the same way liquor gets more palatable as you approach the end of the bottle. He can hear the way Ai Di’s voice is choked with real feeling for once, and he can’t help but feel grateful for the sound of it.

He hasn’t really understood anything for hours, maybe days, but he understands that Ai Di is pledging himself, his entire life, his love, to Chen Yi.

He also clearly hates that he’s doing it, and Chen Yi wishes he knew why loving him was so hard, why it made Ai Di do such unpleasant things. Why he couldn’t have been honest with him instead of clobbering them both.

He needs another fucking drink. On second thought—he needs—he—

He’s piled backwards onto the bed, and he’s momentarily confused, wanting to close his eyes, wanting to feel something that isn’t other people’s disappointment in him.

He pulls urgently at the hand that’s trying to escape his grip. The light shifts, and then he finds a warm body sprawled against his own. Oh—perfect. They fit together. 

The body tries to wriggle away, and that’s unacceptable. Chen Yi rolls on top easily. Stay. Stay.

But be quiet, definitely. Ai Di was just here, and if he hears that he’s brought someone to bed… he can’t let Ai Di down again. He just wants to forget everything that’s ringing with hurt in the back of his skull. He wants the room to stop spinning.

He wants to pass out in this lovely neck.

This person beneath him feels so good. Soft glossy cheek, feathery hair, warm and living against him. There’s something magnetic here, thrumming with energy between their closely pressed cheeks. He can’t stop touching this face, this mouth. They’re both breathing hard, very nearly kissing.

The liquor is trying hard to convince him that this is a stranger, as some kind of backdoor to his own attraction. All he feels for several pulsing moments is the soft hoodie giving way beneath his searching hands, the perfection of that face, angled against him in invitation.

He inhales deeply and it’s—he knows it’s Ai Di, beneath him. 

He only half-tricked himself, sinking just deep enough into this well of desire that he couldn’t possibly climb back out again. The confusion doesn’t last long, because this couldn’t be anyone else.

When Ai Di finally stops holding back, he can taste the relief in his kiss. 

Some long fever finally breaks. His mind clears. 

He tries to keep up with the deluge, the downpour of Ai Di’s feelings, desperately obvious now in the hot slide of lips over his cheek, his neck. 

There’s a familiar bolt of heat when Ai Di rocks back and starts to tug his own clothes off, the same lightning strike lust he felt in the car that day, with Ai Di’s fist in Chen Yi’s hair. The one he’s always firmly ignored. In the purple light, Ai Di is lithe and collared, flushed and real.

The picture he makes on top of him is painfully sexy, so much so that Chen Yi’s alcoholic flush all redirects as he starts to get hard. He feels a belated pang of protest, of sobriety, as things get decidedly out of hand.

“We’re brothers.” He tries to say it like he believes it. It’s his very last ditch attempt to stop himself from crossing this line. He can’t take advantage of Ai Di. It’s wrong.

It doesn’t feel wrong. Ai Di’s nimble hands at the hem of his sweater. The feeling of him in the cradle of his lap is a revelation, even better than the already heady sensation of his waist tucked beneath his arm or his chest heaved over his shoulder.

In that hazy moment he wants very badly for Ai Di to belong to him, not as his friend, not as his right hand, and certainly not as his brother. He wants his undivided attention, he wants to manhandle him, to feel the fight in his body becoming something else. 

And deeper than that, he wants to get that fucking choker wet between his teeth. He wants this most tender version of Ai Di’s touch, his mouth open and earnest, his compact body pressed against his own. He is so alive, so familiar.

Ai Di folds himself back over Chen Yi and mouths at his neck as if to say—do brothers do this? And Chen Yi immediately helps him take his own hoodie off. Fuck it. He wants this. Badly.

Undressed, their chests fit together, skin against skin, heart against heart. They haven’t been close like this in so long. It feels right. Nothing’s ever felt this right. 

Ai Di kisses his neck softly, and Chen Yi kisses his in return; they complete each other like a circuit. He is so precious to him. He finds that he loves seeing him like this, completely honest.

Chen Yi is so lost in it that he barely notices being shoved flat against the mattress. He does notice when a teardrop falls against his parted lips, salty. He can see the fear in the face swimming above him, the heartbreak. He has to lean up, cradle that face in both hands, and kiss him deeply, to prove to him how wanted he is. He should never cry. He should never be hurt. 

Now Ai Di is kissing him like he’s trying to glue them together for good. It’s so much sweeter than Chen Yi could ever have imagined him being. He rocks against him and takes his mouth and his hand with his own, and looks at him with the world turning in his eyes.

The hand-holding is making Chen Yi want to cry too. He squeezes his fingers and rolls him beneath his chest, sucking lush kisses into his neck, deep in the thicket of chains and velvet. He decides then that he has to keep him honest, and warm, and safe, and that he can do that by getting as close to him as is physically possible. No more hiding. 

He’s never really done this before, but it makes sense that it’s with Ai Di. 

So many of his firsts already belong to him. They share a birthday, a childhood, a home, a heart. He’s surprised to find that it’s not really a stretch, putting Ai Di in this new category. Lover. He fits against him like a second skin. He wishes he wasn’t drunk right now. He’s being clumsy with him, losing precious moments in the push and pull of booze, hormones, and racing thoughts.

They fumble together, driven by a heat so intense that it burns a little of the alcohol away. He’s not so drunk that he doesn’t feel acutely every reveal of Ai Di’s body: the visible clench of his thighs when Chen Yi strips his pants away, the splotchy blush that works all the way down his chest, the dark suggestion of hair below his navel. 

The outline of his dick in his boxers, and then the dizzying reality of it closed in Chen Yi’s fist a moment later, dusky and silken. He’s honest here, too. His want is undeniable, he can’t tsk and turn his face away.

He feels complete control over Ai Di for a stretching, weightless moment. This is all it took, all along, to hold his gaze, to manipulate his slippery body where he wants it. 

He looks so into it, into him, and that’s what really turns Chen Yi on, and cuts through the whiskey: being close to him.

He loses time a little bit as he strokes Ai Di, and the tension ramps up between them, blazingly hot. He’s struggling to coordinate Ai Di’s impatient little fucks up into his hand, and the helpless kick of his own hips, caught against Ai Di’s thigh. He feels like he can’t catch his breath.

But then those tricky fingers are pulling Chen Yi’s dick from his pants, and Ai Di is immediately moving, bowing his golden head like he’s going to—god he’s going to—

They’re better at everything, when they’re together. Sex is no different.

Ai Di sucks his cock like he’s been waiting his whole life to do it.

He settles heavily between his thighs and slides down onto him with a tender, pleased little noise caught in his throat. He looks so focused, so flushed, eyes fanning closed, cheeks hollowing as he sucks. He pulls back a little, and Chen Yi’s cockhead smears wetly against the inside of Ai Di’s mouth, briefly rounding out one cheek. He feels a pulse of guilt—little brother, his brain tells him. 

But it’s a deflection, a misfired panic response, because he’s really, really not. They’ve never done anything traditionally, most certainly not family. And Ai Di admitted that he’d been looking at him, wanting him, maybe as long as they’ve known each other. So why should he keep fighting his own feelings? Why should he tell himself not to feel the rush in his chest, wild horses, when he thinks about Ai Di? Why is he committed to a farce, when the truth of how he feels is stuffed inside Ai Di’s willing little mouth?

The thought of it is almost too much. The way he looks—a pearl of precome dotting his cupid’s bow, his kittenish tongue spearing into his slit, tasting—is straight out of a fantasy.

A slender hand comes up to feed his length ambitiously into his mouth, and he swallows carefully as the head hits the back of his throat. The earth tilts. Chen Yi makes a noise he’s never made before. His hand automatically goes to tangle in Ai Di’s hair.

It’s effective encouragement; Ai Di reaches down urgently to touch himself.

“Mmm,” he moans, lingeringly. Chen Yi’s head lolls, overcome with buzzing sensation, and Ai Di’s hooded eyes open as he takes another inch.

“Ai Di,” he warns, and he hums again, a gentle, curving, hmmmm?

His thoughts are starting to lose their shape. His spine is starting to liquify. He thinks, urgently, this can’t end yet. I don’t want to wake up.

Somehow, in the next hazy moment he manages to wrangle Ai Di off of him, despite the reluctant hitch of his shoulders. He’s always been so possessive over his favourite toys. He drags him up his body, and suddenly his neck is hot like a miracle against Chen Yi’s mouth.

They fall right back into making out, but now they’re frotting lazily too, just wet enough from Ai Di’s spit to make it good. Minutes pass like this, moving slow and hazy together as if in a dream, before Chen Yi realizes that Ai Di is unmistakably opening himself up in his lap. 

“Fuck,” he whispers, ears ringing. “Yeah.” He spreads his hands over Ai Di’s ass and squeezes encouragingly, his fingers glancing over the place where Ai Di’s sticky fingers are twisting in himself, impatient. 

In drunken retrospect, he vaguely remembers those fingers coming between their mouths as they kissed, joining the wet tangle of their tongues. He thinks he might have spit into Ai Di's proffered palm, and watched his fingers web with it. He thinks briefly, mind racing, that there’s no way spit will be enough.

But then Ai Di is moving, so much of his height suspended over Chen Yi, so he feels overpowered when Ai Di snakes a hand below himself and pulls Chen Yi’s pulsing dick up—and then—inside, bare.

It’s mind-numbingly hot, and so tight his eyes water. 

His hands fly to Ai Di’s waist, gripping for balance even though he’s lying down. He’s trying so hard to commit this feeling to his slipping, pleasure-flooded memory, this moment where they became one thing.

He’s gripped by spasming muscle, listening to Ai Di’s loose, gasping noises in surround sound, pressed into his ear. His hands go rough on Chen Yi’s shoulders as his body tries to jackknife, and then sinks down an inch, and another, like he’s easing into hot water. Chen Yi bites down at whatever’s hovering near his mouth, which happens to be Ai Di’s earlobe. The cool metal of his earring slides against his tongue.

“The way you feel, Di,” he moans.

“Shut up,” he hisses, grinding down like he’s punishing him, but his voice is willowy, hollowed out with pleasure. “Just fuck me. Please. Just this once.” As if he could stop now.

Chen Yi is obsessed with the feedback loop of their closeness, feeling Ai Di’s breathing in his own chest, feeling himself throb and get slick with precome inside of Ai Di, and then feeling the way he clenches when he notices the same thing.

“Oh,” Ai Di sighs. 

“I know,” he breathes back. 

He’s spent too much of his life not even letting himself think about this. He has to take care of him, properly this time, warn everyone else off of him, make sure he’s fed and full and—and—

He’s only half aware that he’s rolled them over again, that he has Ai Di’s legs spread around his waist and he’s moving urgently between them, rutting him further and further up the bed and watching what pleasure is doing to his pretty face, opening him like a window.

The way they’re connected is more intimate than anything they’ve ever done together before. Somehow more intimate, even, than the reassuring brand of Ai Di’s back against him in the heat of a fight, which Chen Yi always privately considered to be the closest he’s ever felt to anybody. 

This is what he’s been looking for, that extra something that he could never quite pry from Ai Di before, even with all his promises to take care of him and love him like family. It’s the cumulation of the frustration that gripped him when Ai Di would joke incessantly about Chen Yi’s virginity or tease him by draping strangers from the club around him like accessories.

All along, he wanted this feeling, right here, screwing in between his thighs where he’s stretched open for Chen Yi, letting him in. He thinks of the Ai Di from an hour ago saying ‘only me, only I look at you,’ and thinks yeah, yeah. Only me. Only for me.

His limbs are becoming so heavy, gravity dragging him down into Ai Di so every thrust feels deep and syrupy. He licks into his mouth so he can taste the sounds he’s trying to suppress. He can’t get enough of each little sign of his pleasure, his lower lip trembling, his eyes fluttering, his stomach tensing.

He’s gotten so serious about fucking him, so committed to honouring this rare opportunity to be on the inside of Ai Di’s defences, that he manages to jolt him to the edge of orgasm without much finesse. 

He sucks at the salty juncture of his jaw and listens to that normally cool, drawling voice going lax and desperate as he gives in to the pulses wracking his body. Chen Yi fucks him, hotly, grinding their foreheads together, wanting badly to see what Ai Di looks like when he loses control, to witness a version of him he’s never gotten to see before.

“Come on, baby,” he says warmly, tracing his fingers over Ai Di’s gasping mouth. “Let me see you.”

The words hit immediately, explosively—he feels him twitching between them as he comes, making everything beautifully wet and filthy in a way that scratches some primal itch in his brain. With the hand he’s not using to wring out his own orgasm, Ai Di is clutching Chen Yi’s back hard enough to leave a biting set of marks.

It’s all very, very hot, but the low, breathless sound of Ai Di’s orgasm is what does him in. 

Chen Yi is drunk, so he’s lasting, but he’s also new to this, and it’s—Ai Di—so—he thinks, as he clambers even further over his prone body, the fronts of his thighs sticky and flush to the backs of Ai Di’s, I’m going to come inside him. 

It’s an insane, incredible thought. 

If someone had told him yesterday that he would be here, tumbling Ai Di in this bed where he’d so often thought of Boss, he knows he would have gone hot and stupid with denial.

This was never supposed to happen, except that it was probably always going to happen, since the very first day he’d pulled Ai Di out of the rubble of his former life, and they’d decided to mean everything to each other.

Ai Di is his. Even the yesterday version of him would know that. He has to prove it.

So he does—spilling over like a miracle, pushing as far inside as he can physically get, with his hips pressed up tight against Ai Di’s ass. He noses his perfect jaw, feeling this moment of honesty cocooning them, joining them together, feeling one of Ai Di’s soft inner thighs hitching up Chen Yi’s slick back. The meat of his calf weighs him down into the clutch of his body.

“Feels so good,” Chen Yi starts lowly, whispered into his mouth. “You're perfect.” He knows he’s slurring. Exhaustion has him in its palm. But Ai Di is still naked and open around his cock, and he has to stay awake for this. He’s petting Chen Yi’s hair, and his breath is uneven and humid against his face, so he kisses him with too much tongue, endorphin-giddy. “Like you’re made for me.”

“Maybe we were,” Ai Di murmurs, still under whatever spell is making them so frank about their feelings. “Made for each other.”

Chen Yi presses their faces together, overwhelmed. 

“Go to sleep now,” Ai Di says, pulling back, pulling off.

“Stay with me,” Chen Yi says, already fading. “Don’t leave.”

Ai Di is quiet for a long moment. “We’ll see how long you feel that way.” 

“I’ve always felt that way,” he argues. He feels around for Ai Di’s hand in the blankets, and twines their fingers together. “I want you close."

There are tears in his hair. “Okay, Chen Yi,” he agrees, settling back into the crook of him, where they fit unresistingly together. “Okay.”

Chen Yi wakes up to a pounding headache and an empty bed.

He groans immediately upon plunging into consciousness, already feeling muscle aches splintering through his body. He’s gritty, and sticky, and aching with some distant kind of loss.

He’s also naked.

He pulls the covers back and finds Ai Di’s sweater tangled under his shoulder, and dried come flaking from his stomach, and he thinks, oh my god.

He fucked Ai Di. 

More importantly, Ai Di had confessed to him.

All these years that Chen Yi had been muddling his desires, mooning after their Boss, chasing a shadow of a feeling, Ai Di had been watching, waiting, wishing.

His heart aches profoundly. The past twenty-four hours have been such a hurricane of revelations, each one more debilitating than the last. 

He lies there, listening for movement, for the shower running, but he already knows in his gut that Ai Di wouldn’t stick around. Even though, humiliatingly, he remembers asking him to.

Ai Di had already been vulnerable for hours beyond his usual limit, shockingly trusting and pliant as he’d cried and come apart. There’s no way he would have done that if Chen Yi was sober. He probably thought he would forget, but he hasn’t. Maybe the minutia, the moments between, but not Ai Di’s honesty, not a second of it.

He covers his face with his hand. 

It had been so good.

He could still feel phantom sensations: the coaxing tongue, the tremble of his fingers, the shape of his ribcage under the span of both hands. 

He's still trying to reconcile last night, the easy, obvious cumulation of two people who had wanted each other for a long time, with years of confusion and torment, loving Ai Di in the wrong way, redirecting his desire each time it flashed into his head, and thinking of him only as his responsibility, his mess to clean up.

How had he missed the truth? How had he not seen how jealous he was, how possessive, how furious, how starving?

He tries to get out of bed, and everything swims with vertigo. But he has to see Ai Di immediately, and explain that he wasn’t that drunk. Well no—he was, but some sensations were sharp enough to cut through the jungle in his mind.

He catches sight of the note on his bedside table and his heart turns over in his chest. He reaches for it.

I’m not playing with you anymore. Bye! 

He stands, dizzy, as the paper floats from his hand. 

Like it was all a game. Like they’re still kids, and someone got too rough, too real, and they had to call it quits. 

Chen Yi never agreed to call it quits.

“No,” he hears himself say. He knows him. He knows him. He’s cutting Chen Yi loose because he thinks he wasn’t there with him last night.

He’s not sure how Ai Di could have felt the way he hilted in him, whispering sweet nonsense affection in his ear, and doubted that he meant it.

Chen Yi knew he’d been drunk, and guilt-spun, and yearning. He knew it was the wrong timing. But it was the right people. Surely Ai Di knew that. Then again, Chen Yi had been stupid about this for a long time.

He calls his cellphone, and listens to one whole second of the automated message—the customer you have dialled—before he roars with frustration and throws his phone on the bed.

He dresses furiously, perfunctorily, in whatever he can lay his hands on, and is out the door in under a minute. He know what he looks like, what he smells like, but none of it matters.

“Jie,” he calls. “Where?”

“Uh,” Xiao Jie looks startled, shifty, beneath the hood of a busted-looking BMW. “I think he went to headquarters, um, maybe a couple of hours ago.”

“Hours,” Chen Yi repeats, disbelieving. “Why is he there?”

“I don’t know, boss,” he says, shrugging. “He didn’t say.”

Chen Yi turns on his heel. He can’t let him wriggle out of this. He can’t lose him now. It would be so much harder to stomach than losing Boss’s favour. Even comparing the two feels stupid.

“Did you two…” Jie starts.

“Don’t even think about finishing that sentence,” Chen Yi snaps. 

He storms out of the garage, heaves his sore body into the car, and chases after him, just like he always has.

Ai Di is long gone.

When he learns what he’s done—turning himself in, following Zong Yi into danger and captivity in the only place Chen Yi can’t chase him—he rips a conference room apart. 

Boss watches him coolly over a glass of mineral water as Chen Yi goes on a caged rampage around the room. He snatches the glass and throws that too, enjoying the small shower of crystal and water as it explodes against the window.

“He’s cutting ties with the Yiyun alliance,” Boss says. “This is his final debt. Think of it as a gift.”

“A gift?” he repeats incredulously.

He left him behind to go to a place where he knew infiltrators were beating brain damage into people. He’d rather be there than in Chen Yi’s bed. He feels so ashamed of whatever he thinks he took from Chen Yi—his virginity? his trust?—that he’s willing to lose four years of his young life in jail as penance. 

Did he honestly believe that their entire connection was a drunken accident for Chen Yi, and not a fire-bright revelation, an awakening?

How could this loss possibly be a gift?

He’ll get over his mistakes, eventually. He won’t get over Ai Di. He’s an idiot for believing so.

“Come on, Chen Yi. Don’t be obtuse. Zong Yi took the fall for Ze Rui. Ai Di is taking the fall for you.”

He’s shaking his head. “I would never ask him to do that,” he says fiercely.

“You didn’t have to, boy. We both know he would do anything for you.”

Why couldn’t anyone have said this to him a week ago? A year ago? Why did everyone assume that he could see the forest for the trees? All he could see was the trunk in front of him, the whorl of the bark, the wink of a blade. He didn’t do big pictures. He did the next swing of the axe.

“Can’t we get him out?” he asks, his voice small like a child's.

“Even if we could, I wouldn’t. He’s useful where he is. He can’t get into trouble in prison.”

Suddenly, impossibly, Chen Yi is filled with blinding hatred.

“He could be hurt,” he says.

“We all run that risk every day. Don’t be blinded by your feelings, Chen Yi.”

“Fuck you,” Chen Yi enunciates carefully. “You jumped at this chance. You threw him away like garbage.”

“He threw himself,” the Boss corrects. “It was his choice. Respect it.” He pauses, considering, and then adds, “for once."

Chen Yi burns with resentment, and he has to force himself to walk away, leaving the compound before he throttles anyone important. If he loses control now, then he loses the only home he has left. At the very least, he has to keep things tidy for when Ai Di comes back.

He drives around the city, sickly hungover and wan with grief, his skin still pricked and bruised from Ai Di’s touch. He hasn’t even washed him away yet. 

Naively, he thought he’d lost everything yesterday. Today’s loneliness makes yesterday’s look ridiculous, childish.

He goes to the bar, looking for something he knows isn’t there. He has a drink, the top-shelf stuff Ai Di is always shilling, feeling the whole place haunted by him. And then he goes home, to the empty room where they were last together, and crawls into bed.

Four years is such a long time. He can’t even contemplate it. He’ll be twenty-five before he can hold Ai Di again. He rubs his eyes so hard they sting and go dark. There’s an awful lump in his throat. His feelings have never been this close to the surface before.

He can’t protect him in prison. He trusts him to take care of himself, he’s no shrinking violet, but the thought of him, alone and inaccessible, makes him cold with fear.

He’s in love with him, of course he is. He’s been so extremely stupid. 

He remembers, over and over again, his skin against his mouth, the familiar smell of him rich on his tongue. His fingers tangling in that chain around his throat, the feeling of him hard and leaking against his hip, legs spreading automatically for Chen Yi. He dreams about it. God he—he’s out of his mind about it. 

He thinks of the sex they had and reprimands himself, over and over, for not realizing what everything had meant, for as long as he could remember. They should have been fully present together for their first time. He should have taken care of Ai Di. He should’ve at the very fucking least been sober when he was inside him. It drives him crazy that the minute he had him completely, he lost him. 

One half-remembered night together, and a goodbye note.

He’s so angry at him. 

He threw a grenade at their relationship and didn’t even have the courtesy to make Chen Yi hate him. He closed the terrible distance that had been growing between them into absolutely nothing, held Chen Yi like he’d never been held in his life, and then he’d taken it all away without explanation.

He just wants to know why. Why bother telling Chen Yi he loved him if he was going to ignore the way he reciprocated that love? Why sleep with him if he didn’t want to deal with the morning after? Why cry against him as they kissed if he was going to leave him the world’s most flippant break-up note?

He keeps fighting the urge to get in his car, to find him out there in the night and throw him over his shoulder, to corner him into looking at Chen Yi, for god’s sake, but he can’t. He can’t. 

He doesn’t sleep that night.

Things change, on the surface.

The Northern branch of the Yiyun alliance recuperates; liabilities are all squared away; the dragon gang wipes out Zhang Teng’s men, straggler by straggler. From afar, he watches Ze Rui recover (physically at least), settling into a new life amongst his family.

Months pass, and Chen Yi feels like he’s still stuck inside the moment where he first read the spiky little bye! in Ai Di’s handwriting. He starts to self destruct, gradually. He drinks too much, too often. He does his job, although he’s mostly forgotten what he’s doing it for.

He doesn’t go to see Ai Di in prison, partly because the Boss recommends against it, wanting to attract as little attention as possible to their weapon inside, but mostly because he can’t fucking stand the thought of seeing him when he doesn’t want to be seen. 

But then he finds a cache of birthday gifts hidden in Ai Di’s room. 

Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. Engraved trinkets and designer pieces, each of them intensely thoughtful. He pops open the smallest box first, and finds his own name (and their shared birthdate) shining up at him from a silvery dog tag. Blood pounds in his ears, and tears sting his eyes.

It’s so like Ai Di to deflect and avoid and disappear incrementally from their yearly celebrations, to make Chen Yi think that he didn’t care at all, and then to put his true heart into presents that he never gave.

He thinks of Ai Di getting plastered every year on their birthday. He thinks of frosting splattered into the grout in the kitchen. He thinks of Ai Di sliding his feelings into a box and tying it with a bow, and then hiding that box away. He thinks of his ten-year-old promise to the kid with candlelight in his hair and his heart still on his sleeve. He thinks of breaking that promise, over and over again, until that kid became hopeless.

Their birthday is next week, and he has to see him. He can’t miss another one.

He brings him a cake. Nineteen. Twenty-two. He’s nervous, which is bizarre. He’s never felt nervous around Ai Di, he’s had no need to. Except he hasn’t seen him since he was curled stickily against his hip, whispering okay, Chen Yi, like his name was a precious gem and his tongue was the velvet box he was keeping it in.

Ai Di rounds the corner then, shockingly dark-haired and slouching. His face does something complicated when he sees that it’s Chen Yi, a twitch of relief, of longing, and then—the mask.

He’s missed him like a limb. Even when he’s so obviously closed-off, even when he sits across the window from him and picks up the receiver like he’s about to take a telemarketing call.

“Say what you have to say.” And oh, his voice, after all this time.

“I’m sorry,” he says immediately, “that I didn’t come to see you before.”

He falls silent, clearly surprised, not quite able to school his expression into indifference. Chen Yi puts the phone down carefully, and then unveils the cake like a magic trick. He’s meticulous about settling it onto the counter and lighting each candle, prolonging the time that he doesn’t have to see Ai Di’s reaction.

Finally, he makes himself look up. “Happy birthday.”

A heartbeat of Ai Di looking unsure of himself, and then an uncomfortable little grin curls his mouth.

“What? What are you doing?” he asks, like it’s funny. Like this ritual is meaningless to him.

"We made a promise,” Chen Yi reminds him, “that we would celebrate our birthdays together. It means we’re still alive.”

“Oh, come on,” Ai Di laughs. “We haven’t celebrated our birthday since you were seventeen. What happened to you? Did you get struck by lightning?”

Yes, he thinks wildly. That night with Ai Di had knocked him down like a bolt from the sky, flooding his system and setting his hair on end.

Ai Di is looking at him like what he’s doing is absurd, as if Chen Yi being here and honouring their deal is so much less possible than another yearly betrayal.

“Did my landing in jail help you get your memories back?” He’s saying it like it’s all so funny. It’s not funny, it hasn’t been funny, and they both know it.

It occurs to Chen Yi that this is going very badly.

“I didn’t keep my promise,” Chen Yi tells him urgently, wanting him to really hear it. 

He regrets it all, every messy disentanglement to pursue the Boss, every childish dismissal, every mislaid insult. He’s here because something has changed in him, something that reactivated their connection, the old, ineffable knowledge that one of them can’t survive without the other. 

His fist clenches around the dog tag he can’t bring himself to put on, not until he knows for certain what it means.

“Promise?” Ai Di repeats, weakly. Is he really going to pretend that he doesn’t remember? “What’s the promise for? You should spend your birthday with the person you like.” He’s still smiling, but it’s such an imperfect Ai Di smile. Is this the unaffected mask he’s been wearing over his bitterness all this time? It’s clear as glass. How, how has he not seen through it? “Why are you wasting your time on me?” Another unfunny huff of laughter. “Okay, you’ve given me your cake. You lit the candles. I have to go now.”

He goes to hang up, and abandon their conversation. Chen Yi’s heart lurches as if to follow him; he badly resents the glass between them. So that’s it? He’s going to dance around the wound he’s made and bail? He’s going to tell Chen Yi to spend his birthday, their birthday, with the person he likes? Is he stupid?

He presses the dog tag up against the glass. Proof.

Ai Di’s eyelashes flutter for a second as he takes it in. But then he puts that awful little smile back on. “So what? I almost forgot about that.”

This dismissal hits Chen Yi hard. The necklace had recently become his talisman, Ai Di’s feelings for him engraved in metal and hidden tellingly away. He must still be hiding. Why would he have kept the gifts if they meant nothing?

“Don’t come to see me again,” Ai Di says, with finality. They stare at each other. Chen Yi’s face goes hot, and his eyes burn. “Just throw it away. It’s useless. It’s all in the past.” The receiver clatters as he tosses it back onto its dock and really, actually leaves. He watches his narrow shoulders disappear around the corner.

He takes the dog tag gingerly back into his hand, feeling it bite into his palm, feeling again that he’s lost everything. The candles flicker wrongly in the sterile visiting room, and he feels tears streak down his face.

He gets up on unsteady legs, looking down at the ridiculous cake he'd brought. 

He’s not sure what he expected from this. He doesn’t even like sweets. And no matter how much he wants to pretend, Ai Di isn’t beside him, and he can’t share a slice with him, or blow out the fucking candles. Just like Chen Yi can’t touch him, lift his chin up, make him tell the truth like he used to when they were children. 

They can’t share their birthday again just because Chen Yi has finally woken up. It’s too late.

He leaves the cake burning on the counter.

That year, he cries more than he’s ever cried before in his life. Even with his wasted love for the Boss he hadn’t let the tide of heartbreak drag him under like this. He hangs Ai Di’s sweater up where he can always see it. He pours himself as many drinks as it takes to stop his hands from shaking.

During business hours he’s become very cold, he knows he has. The part of him that rises to bait, that experiences fondness, and gets dragged into joy and mischief, is in prison with Ai Di.

He gives orders, arranges partnerships with gang members in their network, tinkers in the garage, deals summarily with petty disputes, collects debts. He bows his head and reports back to the Boss, although his feelings about him have shifted drastically. He loves him, but his approval feels like a boon from an absent god: he wants the encouragement, but it’s always sullied by betrayal.

It’s hard to feel like anything matters. He keeps remembering Ai Di’s tone when he’d said don’t come to see me, and, it’s useless. They feel over. Broken. He keeps thinking that, and then thinking, stronger, absolutely the fuck not. Ai Di waited for him, so Chen Yi can wait too.

On bad nights, he realizes he hasn’t eaten all day, or he’d pulled a trigger that he wouldn’t have before. He’s so numb, sometimes feelings blow through him like wind through a tunnel.

On worse nights, he dreams of Ai Di crawling into his bed and saying, did you miss me? Kissing his ear, pulling on his dog tag possessively, dragging their foreheads together, sharing oxygen. Baby, he’d sing-song. Didn’t I tell you not to see me anymore?

And he’d wake up crying again, the aftertaste of their closeness on his bitten tongue.

The cycle renews. More tears, more rage, more enemies, more obedience. Annoyingly, he keeps being forced to make changes, little adjustments that force his life to shift like sand dunes in the desert wind.

He wants Ai Di to recognize him when he returns. They’ve never been apart for this long. The idea of becoming different people without the other watching is too painful to imagine.

On Ai Di’s twentieth birthday, he can’t stop wondering if he’s celebrating in prison. If he and Zong Yi are eating some confectionary, or if Ai Di is smiling that wooden smile, and pretending today is just another day. 

Either way. He raises a glass in the empty blackness of his room, the silvery moonlight washing his covers grey, and thinks of Ai Di in a cell somewhere, turning his face up to the same moon.

“Happy birthday.” he says tightly, to no once. “I wish you were here.”

Ai Di is nearly halfway through his prison sentence. 

Chen Yi can wait for answers. He’s the boss. He’s in control, and people fear him. 

They’d feared Ai Di too. He smiles in the dark. The pair of them were fearless, street smart, unyielding. Ai Di would set them up and Chen Yi would knock them down. Or Chen Yi would point in a direction, release Ai Di, and watch him wreak destruction like a firecracker. He misses his partner in this, the voice in his ear.

But he can wait. He has to wait. 

Another year passes, even less remarkable than the first. Chen Yi stops crying, and starts throwing punches. Soon he will inherit an empire. He tries to make himself worthy by clamping all his emotions off at the source. It shouldn’t be difficult, there’s really only one wound that still bleeds, but it takes all of his concentration most days.

Ai Di is twenty-one, in his jail cell.

Only one year left in his self-made exile. One year of this unfinished epiphany caving Chen Yi’s chest in. 

He is still so angry. He’s been pissed at Ai Di for a variety of colourful and petty reasons, but he won’t ever be able to forget these four years. Four year trapped in the stasis of not knowing, four years with his heart jammed open and left that way, like a busted safe. Seven birthdays apart now.

On the morning of their birthday (twenty-one—twenty-four) he has another wet dream about Ai Di.

This one is laced tantalizingly with memory, which always makes it more painfully real.

“Chen Yi,” the dream moans. The sound seems cut loose from him; it gushes like a head wound. Ai Di never actually cried his name like that, but Chen Yi wants it from him. He wants his name in the quirked corner of his joking mouth, inside the pinch of his cheek when he’s focused, on the pried-open edge of his orgasm. He wants it to be absolutely certain who’s fucking him, and what it means.

Dream Ai Di is riding him, and his hair is regulation black, mussed from his forehead. His hands are tied behind his back, Chen Yi’s are cuffed to the bed frame, and even though they’re fucking each other, grinding, teeth bared, hands gasping open in their restraints, they can’t touch. 

Chen Yi puts his knees up, forcing Ai Di out of rhythm. He can’t keep his balance with his hands out of commission, so he falls, colliding with Chen Yi’s chest in a way that ripples with sense memory. (For two people who hadn’t been sleeping together, they had fallen into beds together a lot over the years.) Ai Di’s mouth falls opens against a nipple. His tongue flickers.

“Fuck me,” Ai Di is saying. “Just this once.”

“Not just this once,” Chen Yi argues, grinding up, ducking his chin to the crown of his head, trying to get ahold of him, to be close to him. “Again. Always.”

Ai Di repeats himself like he doesn’t even hear him. It’s like there’s glass between them. He grinds, and sucks, and writhes like an animal in a trap. Chen Yi throbs and overheats, unable to get relief, mouth full of Ai Di’s hair, the bourbon and oak scent of his body wash.

He wakes up rutting against the sheets, Ai Di’s hoodie pulled down from its hanger, its sleeve wet where Chen Yi had been panting into it.

“Goddamn you,” he cries, biting into the cotton. He realizes suddenly that he does, in reality, have use of his hands. He rolls onto his back, kicking free from his blankets, and jerking himself off fast, while he can still feel Ai Di all over him. 

He imagines Ai Di gasping awake in his cell right now, finding himself flushed and hard in his prison-issued boxers, and taking himself to the showers. He imagines the way he’d look, trying to keep quiet, maybe thinking about Chen Yi as he bites his fist and slips his hand down his shorts. It’s their birthday, after all. He knows that today of all days, they’re on each other’s minds.

His fist tightens painfully around his cock, and he throws an arm over his face, trying to crush reality out, to leave behind his senses and chase Ai Di through memory.

Just this once. Just this once.

In his imagination, Ai Di comes undone at the slightest tug. Chen Yi licking over his teeth. Chen Yi getting down on his knees, and holding Ai Di’s little rabbiting hips still as he lolls his tongue over the head of him. Chen Yi finally putting Ai Di where he wants him, laid out on the bed with a hand below his jaw, on his precious throat, angling him upwards when Chen Yi comes all over his face.

The thought makes him topple out of control: his hips pulse up, and he spills over his own chest, stray rivulets racing towards the bedspread. 

“Happy birthday,” he breathes. I love you, he thinks, suddenly helpless against it. I love you. Don’t stop loving me. Don’t let me go, or I’ll kill you.

Twenty-two. Twenty-five. Months left, now.

On their birthday, he creeps into a warehouse where he knows an ambush might be waiting, and hopes that he’s calculated correctly. It would be such a shame to die now, looking at the finish line.

He’s become cavalier with his life these days. He’s always survived before. If Ai Di can manage, unarmed, in the dangerous and stratified ranks of the prison, with the guards in the Fan family’s pocket, then Chen Yi can last through an armed skirmish or two.

One of his men has been disappearing out from under his thumb at the height of action, never where he’s supposed to be, and he suspects that he’s been trading in information with one of the dragons. Their truce is only tentative, and Chen Yi knows he’s being closely watched by every major syndicate in town, near as he is to Boss’s right hand, and close as Boss is to retirement.

These days, he cleans up messes before they spread, and he does it with a gun in his hand. 

The warehouse turns out not to be dragon turf, but home base for a whole new player in town, with full pockets and a penchant for buying people into his ranks. Chen Yi deals with his own mole first, cleanly, and then takes out a couple of the new guy’s strongest fighters for good measure. This sort of bloodshed used to feel so unnecessary. But too much has been taken from him now. He draws out the borders of his territory, generously, for this new boss, and he does it with blood.

He rings in his twenty-fifth year with a knife wound to the scalp. It bleeds a lot, but he keeps his ear, which is what matters. It leaves him with a white slash through the base of his hairline, but it could’ve been worse. He knows how badly he can hurt, and this pain doesn’t even rank.

He buys a cake from the grocery store on a whim, blood pouring from his badly compressed head wound. His shopping basket is full of first aid, liquor, and sweets: the Ai Di special.

He brings it to the bar, vaguely aware of the music being smothered, and a number of party-goers being ushered outside at the sight of him. Does it look as bad as it feels? He lets somebody bandage him up, feeling the burn of rubbing alcohol and the strange, swaddled feeling of packed and pressed gauze.

“Ai Di?” he asks, confused.

After a painful moment, the hand leaves the cuff of his ear, and someone’s voice replies, “no. I’m sorry.”

No, of course not. Ai Di is gone.

“Eat the cake,” Chen Yi says, gruffly, even with one foot out the door of his own consciousness. “Don’t let it go to waste.”

“Just three months left, Boss Chen Yi.” The voice says it like it’s his salvation, too. Huh.

“I’m serious,” Chen Yi says, his mouth full of cotton. “Don’t waste anything. You never know…” And then he passes out on the bar.

Ai Di is standing in front of him.

He’s wearing the same red pants that Chen Yi had peeled from his shaking thighs, the last time they were together.

His chest hurts an insane amount. A gunshot amount. 

The glass pane is finally gone from between them, and he has no idea what to say. He does know, however, that he’s hysterically impatient to have Ai Di home as soon as possible. 

He goes with, “get in.”

He’s said it a million times, watching Ai Di’s rebellious posture and knowing the night would end with him buckled into his passenger seat.

Ai Di rolls his eyes, and shoves his body weight into Zong Yi in that brotherly way of his, starting to bully him down the road. As if there’s a reality in which Chen Yi would just let them walk away.

He rounds the car in a second, making a grab for his wrist. He snatches his arm out of reach, so Chen Yi redirects, ducking low and shouldering Ai Di easily into his arms. He feels four years of uncertainty crash up against the essential familiarity of this gesture, the wiry bundle of muscle he makes, kicking and fisting his leather jacket in a way that suggests that he’s not really that committed to getting away. 

“Are you crazy?” he keeps saying, as if he didn’t make him that way.

He doesn’t let himself revel in their closeness. It’s all business right now. Step one: get Ai Di in the car. Step two: get him a proper meal, a hot shower. Step three: pry an explanation out of him for his completely life-ruining decision-making. Step four: Hold him until the hurt goes away. It’s a pretty good plan. He can pin Ai Di down now. It has historically been the thing that resolved all their conflicts.

He slides Ai Di down his body, pressed between him and the side of the Audi, until his boots hit gravel. He bundles him into the car without another word, and Ai Di lets him.

Task accomplished, he stops with his hand on the hood, and breathes out shakily. One way or another, his time is up. He gets an answer today.

Zong Yi looks at him knowingly, and smiles.

Chen Yi takes it as encouragement, and gets in the car.

It quickly becomes apparent that Ai Di is not going to be easy to pin down.

He’s sullen, hand clenched in the door handle like he’s planning on diving out. He drawls non-answers to Chen Yi’s questions, and tells him mulishly to leave him alone, that he’s out of the gang, that Boss promised.

Chen Yi did not promise. Chen Yi had not had a say, in anything, at all. Ai Di can’t seriously think that he can just—

His fists clench on the steering wheel. He can’t afford to get angry now. He can already sense Ai Di’s hair-trigger from the black look in his eyes, like he’s still waiting for something to arrive that will hurt him. Something about him has been sharpened in captivity. His mask isn’t fun anymore; it looks painful to wear.

Chen Yi shuts his mouth, seething with rage and choked affection, and drives them home. Everything will make sense, once they’re back at the garage. He had Ai Di’s favourite food prepared, spicy, fatty, and filling, and he’s restocked his shampoo, changed his sheets, flicked on the bedside lamp that always turns Ai Di’s skin to gold. He’s been waiting to take care of him for so long.

They owe each other a little care. 

He keeps looking over at the side of Ai Di’s face, the shadow of his jaw, the eyes darting beneath his fringe. He’s older. In his twenties now, and looking sort of scruffy and stretched out. He needs to eat something. His earrings are gone, his colourful style flattened by prison regulations. But he’s wearing red checkered socks. It makes his heart ache, for some reason.

They don’t speak for the rest of the trip, but he can feel the way Ai Di keeps wanting to say something and stopping himself. He sort of spams, almost turning to look, but then making himself shut down. He’s gotten better at keeping himself in check, must have learned to hold his tongue in prison. The thought is unwelcome. His Ai Di doesn’t hold back.

Chen Yi won’t be able to take it if he keeps it up—his whole plan hinges on Ai Di seeing that he doesn’t need to hold back anymore. If he sees how Chen Yi came to get him, if he eats the food he prepared, if he hears Chen Yi’s honesty, then he’ll see that those things are Chen Yi’s way of expressing love. 

If he can see that, then he’ll come clean, and if he can come clean, then they can be together.

He just needs to get him home. Home, with Ai Di, and everything will be okay.

Everything is not okay.

He won’t come home; Chen Yi can’t understand it. His ears ring with I’ve looked at you my entire life, his face remembers tears that weren’t his own streaking over his cheek, but he’s batted away again and again.

Ai Di flirts with him, but only when he’s backed into a corner. He cruelly implies that Chen Yi was a convenient lay, and scoffs at him like what they had was juvenile obsession. A virgin complex. Like anyone would obsess for four years like this over sex and only sex. 

The more he sees the light shining through Ai Di’s cracks, his wide-eyed moments of hesitation, the more miserably he wants him. 

He used to know everything there was to know about Ai Di. His fondness for spice and kaoliang, his ripcord temper, his penchant for soft oversized clothes, the way he favoured the colour red, his scattered memories of his father, who he’d once told Chen Yi would always put his hand protectively on Ai Di’s young head, and who had been the first of his parents to die. 

He thought he would always have his ear, and his trust. Chen Yi knew he would help him take care of his memories, honour his likes and dislikes, and keep him in comfort until one of them died. It was a mutual arrangement. They often infuriated each other, but they couldn’t come un-bonded.

But now he feels like he missed a whole arc of Ai Di’s life. 

There are dark facets to him that Chen Yi glimpses and can’t quite make out. Not only is he startling much more easily, jolting from uneasy dreams as if by an electric current, he’s also letting losers at the bar cradle his face and laugh into his cheek. Why? Why would he let some guy, some stranger touch him like that? Why won’t he let Chen Yi kiss him, turning his cheek to him, when the rest of his posture is shaking with restraint?

He just wants to know him again. He wants the truth, because he tasted it once, and it changed his palette forever. He wants him home, beside him, for good.

So when he wakes up to a knife at his throat, his reaction is to smile like he just got a flower delivery.

He watches Ai Di’s familiar shape moving in the dark, the snarl of his mouth, the force behind his grip and the gentleness of the blade as he eases it from Chen Yi’s skin. He leaves more than one thin bleeding mark in the scuffle to get Chen Yi out of bed, but he doesn’t even mind. If every injury for the rest of his life could be at Ai Di’s hand, he would accept every knick and bruise.

Ai Di’s hand is heavy on the back of his neck, and now the knife is a pressure point below his ribs.

“Walk,” he says. 

“Where?” Chen Yi asks, amused.

Ai Di’s hand tightens. “Forward,” he hisses, impatient.

They stumble together, both of them compensating awkwardly for their height difference. Chen Yi could break out of his hold if he really wanted to, but he’s actually touching him, and his focus is back where it should be. Why would he want to escape?

He stifles a smirk when they round the corner and Ai Di’s little hot pot set up is bubbling away in the middle of the room. He should have smelled the bright zip of cayenne in the air. His heart kicks with fondness. His Ai Di. 

He tries to get a glimpse at his expression as he sits him down in the prepared chair, but Ai Di is looking pointedly away. He gets the knife back in Chen Yi’s face, and when he grabs his hair to force him where he wants him, it’s the brightest streak of sensation he’s experienced in years.

“You’re such a pain in my side,” Ai Di is muttering, as he produces a coil of rope from a nearby workbench and starts to bind his hands together at his back. “Dragging me into business that doesn’t concern me anymore.”

He doesn’t know if he’s talking about Zhang Teng, or about their feelings, which Ai Di seems set on pretending are past tense and not raw and exposed and between them right now.

He tugs on the knot he’s made, satisfied, and shoves Chen Yi in the face for good measure. His knife has left a minor cut across Chen Yi’s lip, and he remembers Ai Di biting him in the same place once, getting blood in both their mouths. It’s sick, but the thought warms him with satisfaction.

He watches Ai Di assume his crouched position behind the pot, looking vaguely unsure of himself as he fans the eye-watering cocktail of chilli and steam in Chen Yi’s direction. Things have changed so entirely since the last time they did this. Chen Yi’s tastes have changed. 

The steam wafts over him like a warm breeze. Behind his back, he’s already halfway through unravelling his bonds.

He can’t stop smiling.

“Why are you laughing?” Ai Di snaps, throwing the fan down with a clack. “You’re tied up, stop laughing.”

He storms over and grabs Chen Yi by the jaw, which is just—great. His eyes slip closed briefly as Ai Di gets in his space. He watches the set of his mouth twitching unmistakably with regret when he catches sight of the cut he’s made at Chen Yi’s throat. He’s angry, clearly, but he keeps forgetting himself and letting tenderness soften his hands.

“Tell me, what’s the truth about Zhang Teng’s revenge? I want to hear it from you. Don’t make me force you to eat chilli.”

He smiles patiently up at him, and works the final kink from the knot.

Ai Di steels himself, sniffing, and fishes a steaming rice cake from the stew. He goes to force it on Chen Yi, who meets the opportunity with gusto, letting the ropes fall limp.

There you are, he thinks, as he reels Ai Di in, chopsticks clattering to the ground, and shares the bite between them. Ai Di is so stunned that he just lets it happen, their lips brushing, as close to a kiss as they’ve gotten since he left prison.

“How is that possible?” His eyes are huge. He tucks the morsel into his cheek with his tongue, automatic, and Chen Yi stares. “Since when do you eat spicy food?”

He chews, feeling the heat start to permeate, and almost enjoying it for what it is, which is another of Ai Di’s little marks on him. The cuts, the heat, the rope burn. 

He continues to watch his mouth. “I told you I was going to be serious this time.” He’d meant it. They’re not playing games anymore.

He hoists Ai Di up, so easy, legs slung around his hips, and carries him to the bedroom.

He struggles, because it’s what they do. 

“Let me go, or I’ll kill you,” he warns. Yeah, sure. 

He lets him thrash his energy out, all the way to their bed. Their eyes catch as he’s tying Ai Di to the headboard, sparking with meaning. He’s going to pin him for real this time, and give him all his feelings where he can’t walk away from them.

Ai Di writhes beautifully against restraints. He throws Chen Yi’s old words back in his face. If you untie me I’ll only make your life miserable, if you don’t I’ll just kill you. Is this how it used to feel for Ai Di all the time? Loving someone who fights it every step of the way? It’s exhausting.

He looks down at him. “Should I be afraid? You’ve decided to leave me.” He knows there’s hurt bleeding into his voice, he can’t help it. “No matter what I do, you won’t come back.” Ai Di’s struggle is such a little thing now, barely there at all. Chen Yi frowns, and sits carefully on the bed. “What should I do to make you believe me?”

“What, did you find yourself in love with me when I was in prison?” Ai Di asks sarcastically. His eyes dart to Chen Yi and betray the truth in his question.

“Yes,” Chen Yi says honestly. Ai Di’s arms go limp beside him, his resistance blown out like a candle. “I found myself in love with you when—you left me.”

Their eyes connect again, like a fist around the heart. Ai Di looks so young, fighting hope like this.

Chen Yi swallows. “Will you come back to me?”

Ai Di blinks fast. “Do you see me as a back-up? For failing to win the heart of the guy you truly loved?”

Ah, there it is. The insecurity he’s been pretending is indifference. Ai Di looks away, clearly hurting, and Chen Yi deserves this pain, this distrust, he knows he does.

“I knew it was you that night.” He reaches for his hair, stroking it gently, thinking of Ai Di with his arms folded around his neck, trading salty kisses. Now that he’s started talking, it’s so easy to confess it all, his feelings leaving him and falling into Ai Di like rain. “I still remember what you said to me. When you were in prison I thought about your words all the time. I asked myself why I hadn’t realized I loved you.” It’s baffling to him even now. How he could be chasing the wrong feeling, running in the wrong direction, for so many years.

“It was the first time we’d been apart for so long.” He’d had so much time to think. Even if he hadn’t, he would have known as soon as Ai Di had bowed his head into the juncture of Chen Yi’s shoulder, and laid the world’s softest kiss there. “I found the birthday gifts you’d planned to give me in your room. For my eighteenth to my twenty-first.”

“Shut up,” Ai Di says, voice thick, and that’s how he knows he’s hearing him this time.

He makes himself continue, brow furrowed, heart aching. “I started to imagine—what you were doing in prison.” The memory is still tender. The birthdays he’d spent trying to visualize Ai Di and never being able to. His unpredictability made him so hard to capture, and Chen Yi wasn’t imaginative enough to make the Ai Di in his mind feel real. “Were you celebrating my birthday alone?” Both of them splintered apart, and both of them, separately, celebrating each other, thinking of each other, only each other.

He gathers Ai Di’s face warmly into his palm, and holds his tied hands in his own, looking down into his wet eyes.

“Will you celebrate my birthday this year?” His thumb works soothingly against Ai Di’s clenched fist, and he wipes his tears tenderly away.

“No,” Ai Di croaks, avoiding his eyes.

“You said I should celebrate my birthday with the person I like,” he reminds him. Come on, he thinks. Listen to me. Hear me. “I like you.”

Ai Di is finally looking at him. He unties his hands easily, and watches—with a tidal wave building in his chest—as Ai Di still doesn’t move his arms, staying where Chen Yi put him. He’s going to love him for as long as he lives. So he tells him.

“I want to celebrate my birthday this year with you. And next year’s birthday. Every year from now on, as long as we’re alive. I just want to celebrate with you.”

And now—oh—Ai Di has a look in his eyes that hasn’t been there since that night four years ago. The mask is gone. “You’d better think it over,” Ai Di says, grabbing fiercely at the collar of Chen Yi’s shirt. “What’s mine will always be mine. I won’t let anyone take it away from me.”

Chen Yi has belonged to him for as long as he can remember. But now, finally, finally, finally, they’re on the same page about why. 

The hurt starts to ebb away like it was never there. He laughs, joyful. His hand slides up Ai Di’s warm bicep, and he curls into him. “Me too,” he says, giddy. “I’ll kill anyone who tries to take you from me.” He’s already thought about doing so, more times than he can count. “No wonder I don’t like the customers at your bar.” 

Ai Di thrills at that, and determination dawns on him like a streak of light. He turns them, pushing Chen Yi down and hovering above him like an angel. He can’t help himself from petting over Ai Di’s arms, eyes darting back and forth between his eyes and his mouth, lost in the tension that he thinks might be about to reach its very, very peak.

Ai Di’s touch is featherlight on Chen Yi’s chin, stroking, and he’s staring at his mouth too, heavy-lidded. “Are you really Chen Yi? Am I dreaming?”

It’s so unexpectedly cute, so charmingly romantic, such a different side of Ai Di, that his head swims. To find equilibrium again, he brings Ai Di’s hand to his mouth and nips at his index finger.

“Why don’t you check,” he murmurs.

And then they're kissing.

And it’s better than before, better than anything; his eyes are finally clear to what’s in front of him, and the endless waiting has made every touch feel impossibly potent.

Chen Yi helps him out of his shirt, licks warmly into his mouth and tastes dull, familiar spice. He feathers over old and new scars like he can dissolve them from his skin, and holds himself back, trembling, so that Ai Di closes the gap between them again and again. 

He thinks of Ai Di with a candle in his hand, understanding love innately even as a child, telling him that wishes are about asking for what you want.

Chen Yi has finally learned how to ask.

And as always, Ai Di is his answer.

Who else is there, huh? It’s always gonna be you and me, as long as we’re alive.