022. his lovesick underbelly

The Ren family, devoted allies of the Tian clan, lived nearby Skyline manor, close enough that their children spent their entire lives running from mansion to palace and back again. This morning was no different. Fanxing’s streets were greeted by a bright eyed youth of nineteen who woke every morning with a grin and a prayer for a day that ended with the world better than it began. So often Ren Fei heard that his blind optimism was a personality defect for a man who would one day tend to political proceedings, military movements, and court affairs, but the boy simply waved them off with a toothy smile. 

“It’s okay, it’s okay. If you want a grim face, Ren Li will be here soon,” he always joked. “He can be sour enough for the both of us.”

On his way from the Ren estate to the Tian palace, Fei had grown accustomed to the same faces, the same families, continuing the conversations that began the day before. He slipped sweets to the three or four children who gathered playing stickball at the mouth of the market as their parents shopped for vegetables; he greeted grandmother Cai who sat outside her son’s pharmacy; he bought three oranges from the same vendor whenever he saw them, set up along his path instead of in the middle of the action. 

It didn’t take long for Fei to arrive at the royal complex, bribing his way past Gao Erxun’s daughter, Suilian, with one of the oranges so she wouldn’t hold him up asking questions he couldn’t answer about the eldest Tian, Xiaoxu.

“Will you ask your brother to ask him about me?” Suilian begged the hollow cheeked boy as he continued on his path. “It’s really important, Fei.”

“I’ll ask but no promises,” he replied, heading quickly toward Yuhui’s little courtyard and his wing of the palace. “Ren Li is all business, you know that.”

Yuhui’s room was still closed up and dark when he arrived, so the boy stepped out of his shoes in the doorway, slid open the screen, closed it behind him, then leapt into his sleeping friend’s bed—because that was the easiest way to force the prince to wake up. 

“Yuhui!!” Fei said too loud, long legs resting on the arguably person-shaped lump in the center of that blanket vortex. “A-Yu~, I brought oranges! Wake up before I eat them!”

“Nooooo—” The subject of the Ren boy’s morning violence groaned long, shifting beneath the trap of legs and weight of another body. Laike left him only a few hours ago, in a rush that startled the pair of them to consciousness. The prince was tired all over again, sleep pattern disrupted by something much, much better than the silence of rest.

He pulled his topmost blanket further over his head and curled his legs up to his chest. Yuhui knew that time was not on his side, that he was due to be up for studies and sparring in the sunshine glaze of the Tian clan’s wide yard. Still, he was nothing but serious when he, muffled by layers of sheet, demanded: “Twenty more minutes.”

“I’m gonna eat them now,” Fei reasserted, already beginning to divest the peel from the first piece of citrus. The sweet, tart, bitter scent of orange rind broke the air. “I’m not gonna leave any for you. I’m just gonna talk about how good they are while I’m devouring them and constantly remind you through the day about how I had oranges and you didn’t.”

The air around Yuhui was focused on exchanges. From the same crack in his softcover shell that allowed a suffering whine to escape, the scent of his favorite food delivered itself to the darkness of the half-asleep boy’s cavern. He twisted again and a hand appeared suddenly from his silk-sided mountain. It was presented palm up, silver words of midnight now faded into shimmering splotches, strokes half-remembered in the bright eye of the new day.

Yuhui’s fingers curled with expectation, mute but forceful in his solicitation.

Instead, Fei threw a piece of orange rind into Yuhui’s breathing hole. “Not until I see your joyful face!”

Yuhui’s empty hand slithered back into his comfortable darkness. A moment later that same limb lifted up a corner of his hideaway like a palace gate opened, a hermit kingdom forced to welcome the ray of sunshine at its gates.

“Look at it then,” he dared.

Fei was all too willing to help. The boy took the corner and ripped it away, exposing his somnolent friend to the cruel light of day. 

That bright, noble boy was laughing when he reclined next to his friend in the cold spot where a shadowmancer once laid, continuing his quest to peel the orange. He flicked long strips of peel to the side where they gathered on Yuhui’s pillow before he looked over and offered him the prepared fruit—on one condition: “Now say please~”

“FEI!” Yuhui’s arm stretched long in fruitless pursuit after his bedding, legs quickly scrambling to fix his robe in the upset caused by his sudden reveal. Set right, he turned toward the boy and lashed out, arms grasping for the prize he wanted—nay, deserved. “You can’t keep demanding more when you get what you asked for! You have my face so now I get a wedge!”

“Can’t I?” Fei was a tyrant when given the chance. He held Yuhui away with a hand as he presented the prize aloft, cackling like a villain in some teahouse retelling of a folktale from long, long ago. “Can’t I, a-Yu??”

“You monster!” Yuhui’s retort matched his friend’s melodrama. He retreated and rose from the bed, turning back to gesture enthusiastically. “I thought we were friends! I thought I was more to you than a little monkey to make fun of and make dance for your entertainment, like everyone else in this house! If—if—” The prince stuttered in indecision, eyes looking frantically around his room.

“If you won’t give me an orange, Ren Fei, then I will just go jump the wall and fetch my own!” Yuhui turned like finality, fingers dramatically throwing open the doors to his courtyard so he could march outside.

“You cannot!” Fei exclaimed in character, though his body language didn’t commit to the scene in the same way. When Yuhui turned back to his best friend, the Ren boy was sprawled over the warm spot Yu left behind, arm tauntingly laid out over the edge with that tantalizing fruit between his fingers. “I bought the last three and I had to use one to bribe Suilian to let me pass unscathed.”

Still, Yuhui paced around his courtyard, watching the sky and ground, looking at the way the shadows spilled from their natural habitats. He caught himself doing that very frequently now, watching shadows—waiting for them to take shape, waiting for them to bend around the boundaries of his skin as he passed through their darkness. The boy paused at a tree peeking in over the outside of his wall, branch weeping in a jarring segmentation and scattered foliage. He snapped off a small segment and walked back inside, kneeling gracefully before that bed his tormentor turned into a throne.

“Then perhaps a trade?” The prince’s wrist bent gracefully before the keeper of the fruit, presenting a single bloom out-of-season, a blush of small, pink petals swaying atop the earthy mercury of the twig to which it clung.

Shifting, Fei rolled over onto his stomach, ankles crossed and knees bent, elbows propping him up so he could survey this meager offering. 

In actuality, the courtier treasured any gift from his prince, kept his tokens close to his heart and often looked upon them with a sigh caught in his throat, always dreaming of more. Fei looked up at Yuhui and leaned his cheek against his palm. “What an exquisite item to bring for this trade. I would be a fool to deny such an offer from such a handsome, though disheveled, man.”

“Good, now give me my fucking orange you goblin.” Yuhui pushed his friend’s face aside, throwing off his balance as he lunged for the fruit. Fei crumpled under Yuhui’s assault, rolling onto his side. His grip on the embattled fruit was flimsy at best and it left his grasp, hanging in the air for a moment that seemed to drag with the threat of impending tragedy.

“Oh—”

Yuhui paused as if expecting the worst, waiting for the ripples of his chaos to take the sweet morsel away from him. He watched it hang for a whole minute then plucked the fruit from the air, smiling slyly in moving from his bed to his low table. Across the room, his writing brushes jumped up in the air and tumbled to the ground, seemingly unprompted.

“Thanks for the orange, Fei.” The prince’s mouth was already stuffed, picky fingers pulling threads of pith and seeds from the fruit’s split center. “Are you going to come sit with me?”

“…” 

Fei was always astonished when Yuhui’s chaotic aura worked to his advantage. Too often, it worked against the both of them: when mischief got into the prince’s ghosts, both royal and courtier were typically injured and disoriented for their efforts. 

“Huh, did Mistress Jiling do something new?” Sliding off the bed with the second orange in hand, Fei rose, dusted himself off, then crossed to take a seat with his friend.

The royal met his friend’s eyes, wide and excited. “Oh, you didn’t hear? It wasn’t Lady Jiling that did the warding this week. It was one of her and Master Xueyu’s disciples that did it, a boy our age named Laike. He wrote an epithet on my chest and hands in his blood then we went to the market and had noodles and I showed him around some of the shops aaaand…” Yuhui trailed just in time to put another slice of orange in his mouth, taking the time to press the fruit against the roof of his mouth and squeeze out its juice. The direction of his eyes always immediately gave the boy’s heart away. He looked down, then followed the table’s edge as he recalled the shadow-walker against him. Yuhui swallowed.

“He’s very handsome. We’ve been trading letters and he says he’s not a poet, but he writes so beautifully.” His fingers split another wedge from the ball, picking out a seed and flicking it onto the table’s top.

Suddenly, Fei didn’t feel much like eating. He rolled the orange over to his companion, looking down at the table with his knit brow and his cotton mouth. He barely managed a swallow as he forced himself to smile, to make his voice register as normal when he was suddenly so distant from his own sound. 

“Oh, cool,” Fei replied with both hands flat on the floor, like he’d lose it if touch broke for even a moment. “So you’re like penpals now?”

“Penpals?” Yuhui considered the term in a tilt of his head. “No, not quite. He’s my friend; I call him my friend. He slept next to me last night, but we didn’t do anything—oh, he can move through shadows. Did I mention that already?”

He caught Fei’s orange with the palm of his hand and steadied it next to the one he was still working on. “Anyway, Lady Jiling said she can’t come perform my warding anymore because Yunji needs her, so Laike is taking her place. I hope you can meet him. He’s nice but he doesn’t really know a lot about the world outside of the mountain so I think it makes him a little shy.” The prince’s eyes found his friend again from his animated conversation, chipper chatter shared with the only person he could ever really gossip to and divulge his feelings, his secrets. “You okay?”

“I’m okay, of course I’m okay, why wouldn’t I be okay,” the courtier rattled out as he sat up a little straighter, attention snapping back to full as he looked at Yuhui with his dark saucer-wide stare. Fei was always so curious with his gaze flung open and left ajar, afraid he’d miss something if his view were to narrow even the slightest bit. Now, tension creased the corners of his eyes when he looked at Yuhui, but the rest of his face played like it wasn’t there at all. “Wait, wait, he slept here last night? In your bed?”

Yuhui nodded. “Yeah, next to me. We don’t use the mail for our letters. He comes and picks mine up and delivers his own. I caught him overnight and he stayed for a little bit.” Another piece of fruit muffled his words. “You’re missing out on these oranges, Fei. They’re so sweet—ungh, you always pick the best oranges.”

He was going to regret this,
he was going to regret this
he was going to regret this
he was super fucking going to regret this—

“What do you guys write about?” Fei asked curiously, ignoring the orange-centric compliment. His observation flitted to Yuhui’s hands and the silver ink still clinging to his skin. 

“Well, I originally wrote him to apologize for getting him in trouble because Master Xueyu caught us kissing in an alley. I didn’t really expect him to write back, but he did.” Here, Yuhui shrugged. “We write about different things. I asked him to tell me everything about himself and he said that I should learn him, not be told about him. Sometimes we talk about seeing each other, sometimes we talk abstractly, literally. He gave me a nickname—Xia.”

Yep, that was regret. Fei definitely regretted it.

Of course they’d kissed. Why wouldn’t they have? What did he think had happened? That they’d exchanged chaste letters and laid platonic next to each other? Fei knew Yuhui better than that, knew him better than anyone, didn’t he? Yuhui’s affection was a flight risk: Fei knew this firsthand. Laike would be like every other boy who caught the prince’s meandering eye. He, too, would pass. 

They always passed. 

Breathing deep, Fei relaxed a little.

This, too, would pass.

“Xia?” Fei teased, leaning elbows onto the table as he gushed a mockingbird’s ardor into the name. “OoooOOooOOooh Xiaaaaaa~”

“Oh, be quiet.” Yuhui frowned, severe knot of his eyebrows highlighting the stern stare that met his friend. “When you got up this morning, did you look yourself in the mirror and say ‘ah yes, today is the day that I make my friend miserable by getting him a gift and then making him fight me for it, and then I will mock him for making another human connection? Is that how your morning pep-talk went? Is that how you are so full of light?”

“I don’t want you to be miserable, Xiiiaaaa~” He batted dark lashes and big brown doe eyes, moony for the sake of selling his unrequited love as a best friend’s jabs at a soft, lovesick underbelly. “I want you to be happy, I always want you to be happy. Why do you think I gave you both oranges, huh?”

“Stop it.” The reprimand was sharp, a hard line from a soft boy, a tone so far removed from their lighthearted japing. “You are not allowed to call me that, so don’t do it again.”

Strangely, the prince was also not feeling so hungry anymore. He was beginning to feel foolish, in fact, covered in the silver transcription of his early morning and surrounded by people that took great joy in teasing him. Most of the time he could take it, shrug it off and move forward with his day, but to hear that name he so adored weaponised for the sake of a frown quickly infuriated him—Yuhui was quietly simmering when he sat the orange down on the table and picked himself to go wash away the argent reminder of a happier memory.

Fei tucked his chin, stung by the other boy’s reprimand—it seemed neither boy could really keep from hurting the other: one unwitting and the other unwilling to place the source of his animosity. Suddenly quite uncomfortable, he rose when the other boy left, slid open the screen silently, and escaped outside. 

That sweet boy had finally learned to make the serious face his father so wished he’d wear, an expression more suited to his elder brother’s features than his own. Suilian didn’t even try to stop him when he passed her by on his way out of Skyline manor—

he didn’t seem like he’d be in the mood for games anymore.