Chapter Text
Good evening, dear passengers. Welcome onboard flight HL888 with service from New York to London. This is your captain speaking. We’ve been requested to wait for a passenger who’s currently being transferred from terminal 2. This means that our departure time will be delayed for approximately ten minutes. Apologies for the inconvenience; we’ll do our best to get back on schedule once we’re in the air.
Sprawled rudely across two seats of the leather couch in the first class exclusive bar, Hua Cheng huffs. It’s a random Thursday night in the middle of low season, but the plane is fucking packed. So much so, that the airline decided to send their bravest flight attendant—a scrawny girl with the flattest face he’s ever seen, who introduced herself as Xiao Ying when she found him on the first class lounge like an hour ago, lazily scrolling down some video app while sipping red wine—to convince him to give up half of his first class couple’s pod to a stranger.
“I’m gonna guess you lot decided not to take no for an answer,” he drawls scathingly, nodding towards the loudspeaker.
Xiao Ying bows until her body makes a perfect 90° angle, hiding her flaming red face from view. She did the same in the lounge, when Hua Cheng let her know that her unprompted arrival had made him accidentally refresh his feed and lose the video he was watching to the grubby hands of the void. He’s not the type to get worked up about things like that, but the guy in the video looked positively ethereal walking along the shore of the Love River in Taiwan, and he was talking about the legalisation of gay marriage over there with a lot of property, shining eyes and a sweet, sweet voice. He’s itching to scroll around until he finds him again.
“Please, sir, believe me when I tell you that the airline exhausted all options trying to avoid this situation,” Xiao Ying says, holding her awkward position, her eyes trained on the floor. “The case of this passenger is totally unprecedented.”
Hua Cheng clicks his tongue. “You can stop doing that.”
Xiao Ying straightens like a spring being released. They seem to come from the same country, which might be the reason why this stupid airline sent her to appease him with an attempt at culturally appropriate protocol. Too bad; Hua Cheng isn’t moved. This girl’s job and this airline’s business aren’t his problem. He’s only concerned with the fact that he treated himself to the couple’s first class pod to have some decent shut-eye after three weeks of gruelling work in the USA, but now he’s being told to suck it and cram himself into a single bed for no goddamn reason. He couldn’t care less about the astronomical compensation in both money and points that he’ll get for his troubles, and due to some nonsensical privacy reasons, Xiao Ying isn’t even allowed to give him details about his soon-to-be neighbour. It’s ridiculous. The least they owe him is to tell him who this person is!
Once again, he considers the alternative suggested by the airline, which is to switch places with a couple currently in business class. That way, Hua Cheng and the newcomer would have individual seats, mediocre but passable, while the lucky upgraded pair would get a once in a lifetime chance to join the mile high club.
Fuck that. If he suffers, everyone suffers.
“I’ll stay here during take off,” he decides, reaching for the seatbelt he knows is hidden somewhere in the fold of the couch. “Get that person sorted on the left side of the pod and raise the partition before making my bed.”
Xiao Ying bows again, briefly enough that Hua Cheng can’t protest, while getting to avoid his deadly gaze and discreetly breathe all the tension out of her body.
“Won’t you dine on the plane today, sir?” she asks once she straightens again, the fake grin plastered in her face looking almost painful. “I’m happy to bring your meal here.”
“I’ll have the wine list for now.”
“At once!” Xiao Ying twirls to take said list from the bar. “May I bring you something from your seat? Sleeping clothes, or the amenity kit, perhaps?”
Hua Cheng agrees to the latter. If he was by himself as planned, he’d put on the pyjamas. The flight will last around seven hours, barely long enough to justify a change of clothes, but even if the pants that they provide are always too short for him, it feels nice not to wear street clothes to bed. However, he doesn’t want to be in any state of undress while lying down next to some rando. The partition he asked Xiao Ying to pull out is thin and flimsy, mostly for show, as the pod is designed for couples. The resulting lack of privacy means that he’ll have to sleep with an adhesive eyepatch, too. He’s never allowed anyone to see his eye socket scar outside a surgery, and he’s not about to start now. It sucks, because he’d counted on the pod’s doors to keep both snoopers and flight attendants from seeing his bare face.
Dear passengers, this is your captain again. I’m happy to inform you that we’ve finished boarding. We’re next in line for take-off and will be in the air in approximately six minutes time. Please pay attention to the indications of the cabin crew and the safety video. Thank you for your patience. Enjoy your flight.
The bartender gets into flight attendant mode and takes away his wine glass and the little plate where he’d previously been served some smoked salmon (decent) over cucumber (he didn’t eat any of it, arranging the sad slices in the shape of a flower instead) to snack on. Hua Cheng fiddles with the end of the seatbelt while the plane taxies. He regrets not having got off to demand a rescheduling while he still could, but considering how full the plane is, and that more people travel during weekends, delaying his departure wouldn’t have been an intelligent move.
The safety video plays on the side screens. The plane accelerates, and a baby starts crying just past the curtain that separates the bar from the passengers’ cabin. The prospect of staying there the whole flight, drinking while digging around for the lost video of the cute guy, becomes less appealing by the second.
The plane takes off. Hua Cheng watches the dark silhouettes of buildings become smaller until they fuse together to form the background of a constellation of city lights. He doesn’t like New York. He doesn’t like London either, but for one reason or another, it has become the most convenient place for him to have a residence. Not a home—Hua Cheng has no family there waiting for him, or anywhere, for that matter—but he has a nice enough place in Soho where he can relax and get reasonably authentic food if he wants to.
As soon as the seatbelt sign goes off, Xiao Ying comes to give him the amenity kit and the dinner menu. He’s not hungry, but the starter of roasted duck doesn’t sound bad. While he waits for the food, he connects to the plane’s WiFi and, at last, opens the video app to start his long-awaited search.
@kingdom_of_rain:
[A generic bar graph animation is followed by footage of a man loading an industrial grinder with crumpled paper]
“Producing one tonne of recycled paper uses 7000 fewer gallons of water than producing the same amount of non recycled pa—”
Caption: We can make a difference #reducereuserecycle@redditsdeepwaters:
[Some Minecraft gameplay on a map with tons of water]
“AITAH for getting in a relationship with the younger sibling of the man who ruined my life? I (M26) used to work as a marine b—”
Caption: Should he have kept his distance? #redditstories #aitah@mingguang_h0h0:
[A montage of many clips where the same middle-aged man smiles at the camera while holding a different woman by the waist every time]
“30 days, 30 dates: how I use SEO to get to the top of any dating app I w—”
Caption: Don’t be jealous, join me! Link in bio@halfmoonhalfdeath:
[A small snake with glinting purple scales chills on a flat rock, while a black scorpion crawls on top of its body]
«Mii music»
Caption: A scorpion somehow got into my pet snake’s terrarium and they became friends?
Hua Cheng watches the full video of the animals interacting and has a look at the comment section, where people debate about which of the two are more dangerous, and how combining them would create the ultimate killing machine. The top comment, with two thousand likes, says the resulting beast should be called a ‘snarpion.’
What a stupid name.
Three old men come in and take a seat at the only other table in the bar. If more people follow, they’ll have to sit next to Hua Cheng. What’s the point of paying first class, if he can’t have a moment of peace? He’s had enough of being forced to interact with rich assholes over the past few weeks. If one more of them tries to socialise with him, he’ll become homicidal.
Xiao Ying arrives with his dinner, this time waiting for him to mute his earbuds so he can listen to her, as she should. However, something in her demeanour tells Hua Cheng that she’s also bringing bad news. With a sigh, he rests his face on his hand and looks at her, arching a brow to prompt her to speak.
“The bed is ready for you, sir,” she announces, clutching her tray as if her life depended on it. “The other passenger has already gone to sleep.”
That person either eats incredibly fast, or couldn’t be bothered with dinner. No matter, this sounds like a good development. Always that he doesn’t wake his neighbour up, Hua Cheng should be able to return to his seat and enjoy a few hours of privacy.
“Right…” he starts, unsure of why Xiao Ying looks so nervous.
“The partition is stuck!”
“Wh—?”
“It’s not possible to pull it out!”
Hua Cheng’s body processes the information faster than his mind. A wave of tension clenches every single one of his muscles, the hand he’d been using to rest his head on closes into a fist. The men at the other table murmur something. They probably saw the other passenger in passing, and are now putting two and two together. Soon enough, they’ll be laughing at him.
He shuts them up with a vicious glare, punctuated by a crack of his jaw, and then looks back at Xiao Ying, making her cower in fear.
Honestly, this is what he gets for being a fucking idiot. If he’d used his brain, he’d be checking in the imperial suite of some fancy hotel in Manhattan, instead of being involved in this shit show. He could’ve spent the night star-fishing in an Alaskan king bed, make the airline pay for a weekend of decadence, and then fly in actual, real first class to London on Monday, commitments be damned. Why was he on a rush to go back to his shithole of a flat? Who told him to accept sharing his pod with someone he knows nothing about? They could be a bigoted granny who stinks of mould and dust, or an annoying tech bro in dire need of a shower, or a fashion influencer coated in eye-watering cheap perfume.
He didn’t even know he could be this preoccupied with how other people smell!
Looking down at his roasted duck starter, Hua Cheng reasons that he must be thinking about that because the aroma of the dish is nothing short of heavenly. Perhaps he should eat it to clear his mind, and then breach the cockpit to make this poor excuse of a plane dive and join the wreck of the Titanic. That’s a solid plan. Taking the fork with one hand and the phone he’d left lying on the table with the other, he stabs a piece of duck with a bit too much force. Xiao Ying, who’s still standing next to him, lets out a little yelp.
“Scram,” he tells her with no ceremony, and she’s gone so fast that it feels like she blinked out of existence.
Unmuting his earbuds, Hua Cheng scrolls past dozens of videos without paying attention to any of them, chewing the tender duck pieces harder than necessary until he finishes his food. Where is that dreamy guy? If before Hua Cheng was just craving a distraction, now he’s fixated, obsessed like a hound after a wild hare. Why was he talking about gay marriage in Taiwan? Perhaps he wants to marry there someday. Hua Cheng saw him for a whole twelve seconds, enough to know that the guy is some flavour of LGBTQ. He’d bet his entire fortune and a hand that such is the case. He’d also bet that he’s a massive nerd (endearingly), and that he smells divine, not like whatever excuse of a person is encroaching Hua Cheng’s pod.
At some point, the bartender quietly takes his plate away and brings him a complimentary glass of red wine without asking. It’s not a bad gesture, but she should’ve brought something different, preferably stronger. Although Hua Cheng is the kind of drunk that breaks windows and starts fights against the police at train stations, it takes a lot of alcohol to get him drunk at all. Despite the risks, giving him interesting liquors is usually a good way to appease him.
To that effect, he pauses his crusade for the lost video to eye the bottles behind the bar. This allows him to notice when a man and a woman glance at the free seats at his table as soon as they come in. Great. Before he’s presented with an opportunity for second-degree murder too hard to resist, he downs the wine in a single go, grabs the amenity kit and locks himself in the nearest lavatory, which belongs to business class, planning to spend as much time as humanly possible on his night skincare routine. Unfortunately, he barely manages to wash his face and half-brush his teeth before one of the old geezers who sat at the other table starts knocking and shouting as if his life depended on it. Hua Cheng seriously considers leaving him out to shit his pants. There are like seven more lavatories in the plane. What’s the need to use this one, specifically? It occurs to him then that the fucker’s seat might be right across his pod. He’s worried enough about the smell of his pod mate (is that even a word? How sinister!) as it is, so he slaps his eyepatch back in place and storms out.
As expected, the newcomers took his table. The bar is now crowded and unpleasant; Hua Cheng can’t spend more time in it. There’s a space between premium and business class where he stops with the intention to loiter for a while, but then the captain announces that the plane is about to enter a zone of turbulence and asks all passengers to return to their seats.
When the seatbelt sign lights up, Hua Cheng accepts his defeat. It’s time to see with whom he’s doomed to spend the next six hours. Best case scenario, they’re still asleep and he’ll have the chance to put on the adhesive eyepatch, which should be in his handbag, right there on the bed. He’ll have to be quiet.
The doors of the pod are open and the screens are off. At first, all he can see of the other passenger is their right foot, clothed in a dark sock, peeking from the bottom edge of their quilt. Grateful for having left his heavy and noisy boots in a drawer before heading to the bar in slippers, Hua Cheng stealthily takes a step and leans to the side to check if this person is really asleep.
His pod mate, a young man by the looks of it, is indeed lost to the world, lying on his back with the quilt covering him from the abdomen down. He’s facing away from Hua Cheng, so all he can see is a cascade of luscious, long and dark hair sprawling like ink across the pillows. The top half is haphazardly tied up in a bun, while the rest of it is loose and left to its own devices. That’s a less than ideal style to wear in bed—Hua Cheng would know, his own hair reaching his middle back. Along with the fact that the stranger isn't wearing the complementary pyjama of the airline, but instead what appears to be a loose red Henley jumper, this suggests he had a long journey and went out like a light as soon as they boarded the plane. It’s unlikely he’s going to wake up soon.
All things considered, it could be worse. There’s no snoring, no tossing and turning, and no bad smells. His neighbour is well contained on his side of the bed, too, leaving plenty of space for Hua Cheng to relax without risking unwanted physical contact. Kind of amused by the fact that they both have long hair and favour the colour red, Hua Cheng turns towards the shelf to search for the adhesive eyepatches in his handbag, and realises that his own jumper, which should be there too, is nowhere to be seen.
That’s weird. He’s sure he left it on top of the handbag before heading to the bar. Where could that girl Xiao Ying put it? He turns around with the vague idea of looking under his pillows, and the realisation dawns on him as soon as his pod mate gets back into his range of vision: the red jumper the man is wearing isn’t loose, it’s just too big on him because it’s actually Hua Cheng’s!
Once again, his body catches up with the situation before his mind does, and he feels himself heat up until he’s boiling. At first, he thinks it’s outrage, the raw, primal fury that carried him through his grim childhood reigniting at the sight of someone taking what is his. No matter if he’s filthy rich now, or if it’s been at least a decade since he had to fight tooth and nail against his two older brothers and their asshole friends, Hua Cheng still feels the urge to bite. However, if what he’s feeling is wrath, then why isn’t he acting upon it? With the day he’s having, and the five or six glasses of wine already in his system, he should be halfway through earning a warm reception by the Scotland Yard upon landing, accompanied by an arrest order for physical assault. And yet, he remains where he is, staring silently, not to disturb the stranger.
There’s something about the image of the man wearing his jumper that’s scratching an itch in his mind. The heat swirling around his body starts to settle, becoming fuzzy, like some sort of alien satisfaction. He feels like he knows this person, but he doesn’t know anyone who makes him feel like this. The vague memory of luscious dark hair framing an angelic face with bright, kind eyes and a soft smile starts to form in his head.
Then, the stranger in his pod sighs and turns his face in his sleep, and Hua Cheng thinks he hears his sanity crack. This person is beautiful to the point that he doesn’t seem real. Under the neutral, soft light of the corridor, he looks like he could be anywhere from seventeen to thirty-seven, or maybe he’s a seven hundred years old immortal who enjoys to mess around with humans by, for example, sneaking his way into their beds on international flights after teasing them through nerdy videos about gay marriage in Taiwan.
He’s the dreamy guy from the video Hua Cheng has been looking for. He’s sure of it, just as sure as he is of having lost his goddamn mind!