025: the face of a thief

Leaning against a low scrap-metal outcropping in a salvaged wall, Jin gestured to the knee-high padded bench-table in the middle of the room—a makeshift setup somewhere between examination table, drinking lounge, and bed. “Strip and sit. Lemme see what you got.” He paused. “…Sir.”

With a nod, the noble began to remove his clothes, fingers working the knot-and-clasp mechanisms that cinched all the closures of his perfectly arranged robes. He shed one layer, then two, sunset silks soft in their shifting sheen; he stepped out of his shoes, then his pants and neatly folded all of the items into a stack of perfect squares. The pace at which this all happened was slow—Li wasn’t intent on putting on a show with his disrobing but his heart was pounding too fast for his fingers to work any quicker. That noble boy born of respect of modesty was scarlet in the face by the time he sat on the table in his underwear, swallowing a mouthful of nervous spit in a surreptitious gulp. This was just business, right? The tattooist probably saw the near-naked bodies of all sorts of people daily.

White designs augmented gold tracers stretched long across his skin. From his right foot, cradled like a stirrup, marks stretched into dashed and dotted design that terminated around his thigh in a thick band. He had a similar pattern on his left forearm and the back of his neck where further arrangements were etched down his spine, stopping just past his shoulder blades.

“You can, uh, just call me Li for now,” he mumbled, suddenly ineloquent, barely able to hear himself over his drum beat pulse thrumming hot in his veins. He decided he would throttle his brother when this was through. How could he have been so willing to let Fei talk him into doing something like this just because he felt bad? Li was such a sucker for his sibling’s sadness.

Of course Jin was used to watching people undress by now—and of course, as a professional, he never thought twice about it—but there was a slow reluctance to Li’s movements that gave the artist pause. With at least three artifacts embedded, that nobleman should have been used to being seen by now…

but maybe he was just shy.

“Don’t be so nervous, Li,” Jin replied with a warm smile as he crossed to his prospective client and sat down carelessly next to him. Jin quickly surveyed the piece on the regal boy’s back before he took a tattooed arm in his hands, running his touch over the intricate tracers laid into highborn skin. “We’ve met before so that makes us friends, right?” He glanced up with that grin still sketched onto his rakish features. “If you keep mumbling and looking away, I’ll forget we’re friends—I can’t call your name if we’re strangers.”

“Please forgive me,” Li replied with a reluctant-to-recover confidence. “I just… when I woke up this morning, I didn’t expect that the day would take me here and have me stripped. I’ve only done this a couple of times, it’s still pretty new to me.” The noble was far from exuberant but he did seem a little more open, at least. He moved his gaze toward the man at his side, watching the appraisal of his limb with interest. “Prince Tian Xiaoxu is still so pleased with your work. You did such a good job of setting his pearl.”

“Deciding that you’re gonna win the Millipede is just a casual decision for you, ah?” Jin smirked as he placed his own tattooed hand palm down on Li’s forearm. His tracers came to life, gold strands glowing a steady stream of blue to light a line of three pale opals inset up the length of his middle finger’s metacarpal. “Must be nice, having that sort of freedom to choose your destiny.”

A cyan grid flickered to life mapping out the other man’s muscle and bone, his skin like a screen. White came next to display Li’s every tracer and via for Jin’s analysis, green code scrolling over neon violet reproductions of white ink designs. 

This was the magic of Jin’s natural capacity perfectly aligned with three well chosen artifacts, a testament to Hua Ruizhi’s love for her one and only grandchild. 

“I didn’t decide that I was going to win it, a c t u a l l y,” the wealthy boy shot back at the assumption of his intent, offhand in his own defense. He looked up from the maze of neon muscle mapping, meeting Jin’s smirk with his own incredulous regard, eyes sharp and narrowed. “I just wanted to see if it was something really worth challenging for, you know? ‘Cause I don’t want to go through all the effort to get it if it’s not going to be useful to me—not when Xiao and everyone else in Fanxing are going to be out there trying to win it.”

“A c t u a l l y,” Jin slurred back, leaning in a bit too close as he slapped a hand on Li’s back, arm wrapping around nude shoulder. “I don’t think you want that Millipede at all. I think you came here to see me about something else.”

“Is that right?” Li leaned away, into the arm that held him, only so he could get a better look at Jin. “Well don’t keep me waiting, what else is it that I’m here for?”

“Well…” The boy with the choppy black-red hair leaned with his client, free hand on Li’s knee. “I think you came here to ask me to fix whatever this guy—” He gestured to Li’s arm. “—did to you.”

Li’s brows knit as the boy was suddenly self-conscious again, lips barely parting in surprise. Silent but for a moment, the noble’s eyes fell to his appendage, scrutinizing it in the other man’s light. “Is… Is it bad?!” He looked back up quickly.

“It’s not bad.” His tone changed trickster-quick, fluid as his free hand ran along the edge of the filaments connecting relic to relic. “It’s just not the best. Or… really artful, or… smart—is this who does work at the Tian house? I mean why is this over here connecting this way?” Plucking up the white lines in his fingers, he began rerouting pathways, reconnecting artifacts to augments. “This—now this is a better main line. Connects your augments so not just your weapon can reach it, but your shield can too.”

“Oh—okay.” The oldest of the Ren children watched the inlayer work, a willing participant in his efficient reconfiguration. “Thank you. Yeah, it was the guy the Tians always use. He’s old, you know? I don’t think he has any interest in thinking about things from any angle other than the one he knows and has relied on since the beginning of, um, time. Just does his thing, steady and sure, without thinking about how things could be improved.” Li moved his head, chin tilted at a curious angle. “Is that your grandma downstairs? She made it seem like you don’t get much business. Have you thought about setting up a shop closer to the palace? I bet you’d get a lot of clients around there.”

“She doesn’t get what I’m trying to do here,” the artist said with a dismissive wave of his hand. He slipped off the low table to kneel before the Ren clan’s eldest son, taking him by the ankle of his augmented foot so he could rearrange the tracers. “She thinks this stuff is like her flowers—she won’t think I’m successful or a good grandson unless she sees my work around every artifact in Fanxing but that’s not what I’m looking to do, you know?” He looked up at Li from his place knelt before him, resting his hand once more on Li’s knee. “I’ve only been open a few months. I’ve already inlaid the Prince and now look: here you are. I must do good work if Ren Li has taken the time out of his busy life to seek me out.”

“So… What is it that you’re looking to do, then? Good work on the upper class only? Or just good work in general… ’cause you know you already got that down, otherwise you wouldn’t have been so confident when you sold me on all this.” With a finger, Li gestured to the business Jin was conducting upon him. 

“I want to do legendary work,” Jin replied with a smile. “I want to make winners. I want to make heroes. I don’t care who they start out as.” Perhaps the dream was too aspirational, too romantic. The Hua matriarch hadn’t raised that boy on small dreams, no: she’d raised him on stories of his place rising to the heavens, raised him in myths of valor and old gods. “And I’m just laying this out. This isn’t for real—unless you want it to be.”

“Ah.” Li took his bottom lip between his teeth as a grin crossed his lips, made a suspicious crease in his cheek. “How long do you think it’s going to take to have done, and how good at making people miserable is your grandmother? I’m one hundred percent on board if your answers are ‘a while‘ and ‘very.'”

“It’s not a quick thing, and it’s not painless—don’t think it’ll be easy like this here, but…” Scratching at his jaw, the lower-caste boy squinted up to the ceiling, inspecting the beams. “…if you really want to challenge that Millipede and win, even if it’s just to give it to someone else, I could get it done in a week. If—if—you come every night.”

“Hmm. I may leave the Millipede to everyone else,” Li hummed contemplatively, lifting his arms to gather his long hair in his hands and pull it over his shoulder, letting those dark strands spill down his chest. He seemed fine leaning in to Jin’s earlier hunch. “But I will still come every night if you need me to.”

“If you’re not gonna fight in a week, what’s the rush?” Jin seemed easy-going, as he gently set Li’s heel back on the ground and rose from the floor. He paced the room after he rounded his workbench, appraising the back piece from a distance before he approached. The rough-hewn boy sat behind his well-to-do acquaintance, touch warm as he began to rearrange the fighter’s spine. “I was thinking about challenging this week too, actually. Just to start getting my stuff out there, get some practice.”

“Oh yeah? Are you good?” Li glanced back curiously, conscious to keep his spine as straight as possible. “I heard rumors of some new fighters debuting. It’s going to be a really crowded field… of course, the artifact is top tier.”

“I don’t know, are you good?” Out of highborn view, the artist let his smirk linger, let his eyes wander down his potential substrate’s back. “If a man ever answers yes to that question, he’s not very good. That’s what they say, right?”

“I think some men could answer yes and be just fine.” Li grinned and looked back to his lap. “I got my ass handed to me the last time I was in arena. I have a lot to learn still. Is there a swordmaster who trains you?”

“That’s a secret,” Jin claimed, mock severe as he flicked the offender’s spine sharply—just like how the poor boy’s grandmother so often did to him. He salved the wound with a slick taunt tossed over Li’s shoulder. “Nosy, aren’t you?”

“Ah!” The noble bolted up straighter, spine snapping as though it were adhered to a string pulled suddenly taut. “Sorry. Jeez. I thought we were friends, but that’s fine. Keep your secrets.”

“We’re friends.” A confirmation was patted onto the Ren boy’s shoulder as his new friend took his first position back, sliding back into the seat next to Li. “But we’re not really friends until I fix this thing you’ve got going on—and if we’re not friend-friends, I can’t go tellin’ you my life story, okay. You might be some arena spy, here to steal all my secrets.” Jin leaned into his companion again, eyes narrowed as he searched his potential client’s face. “Are you here to steal from me, Ren Li?”

The more he experienced a moment, the braver Li became. He’d been stripped before this inlayer for some time now, nerves whittled into submission by the back and forth of comfortable conversation. When Jin met him in closeness again, Li stepped up to inhabit the space. He pressed himself back into the artist, tip of his nose greeting his supposed friend in a gentle touch, face delivered too close for clear observation.

“Does this look like the face of someone who would steal?” The noble asked of the man, eyes focused on the others’.

Jin couldn’t really back down: he’d started this, after all. He didn’t know exactly what he’d started, but it was absolutely irrevocably started. 

“That’s not fair,” the inlayer balked gently, grin wide on his face. He ceded no ground. “I can’t see ’cause you’re too close.”

“Then back up,” Li suggested, lopsided smile shaping his lips.

“After you,” Jin offered in return, gaze flitting down as he began to understand the implications of their proximity.

“I wasn’t the one complaining,” the eldest Ren countered, gaze softened but unmoving.

“Are you trying to steal from me, Ren Li?” Jin’s restated question was formed under innocent skies, even when his lips brushed Li’s by accident.

Jin could win this game, this standoff—and if he won, he’d have a client for life.

“I’m sitting before you in my underwear, Hua Jin. Does it look like I am trying to steal from you?” Li tilted his chin, skewed his crooked and blurred observation as if to either add more pressure or avoid that which made his cheeks warm with a rush of life. “You know what my face looks like. Is it the face of a thief?”

“Are you trying to kiss me?” The artist was suddenly plain, a little less confident, question uttered on a breath of Li’s own CO2.

“—N-no,” Li breathed as he pulled away, body shifting to turn straight ahead on the table, brows furrowed, flesh flush. “Is this… can I put my clothes back on?”

“Ha! I win!”

But did Jin really win? Had he wished the answer was different? Regardless, the artist forced himself off the precipice of a laugh, diving headlong into the act: this had all been a test of wits and he, Hua Jin, smartest boy ever (as dubbed by Hua Ruizhi) had emerged victorious. “And I mean, that’s up to you: do you want me to do the work?”

Li nodded his little acknowledgement, back to taking in the strange configuration of the inlayer’s room. “Yeah. Yeah, if you have a better plan of how my pieces should work together, then yes, I’d like to have the work done. But that’s a later thing, right? Didn’t you say it would take a while?”

“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we can’t start.” Jin was bright despite Li’s retrograde behavior. “You seem like you want your brother to suffer a little. I’m sure a-po is treating him… kindly. We can let them be friends.”

“Right. Okay.” The eldest of the Ren boys’ found the tattooist in his line of vision again, charting a slow course down his walls and floor, across his own lap to the warmth of another body so near. “Yeah, go ahead and get started then. I’m sure Fei’s having a grand time down there.”

“Lay on your stomach,” the craftsman said as he rose from the bench, still assessing Li as though he were simply analyzing the notes floating over his skin. Once Li complied, he turned toward his cabinets and began to rummage through his supplies, systematically setting himself up to extract and rearrange the artifacts and threads. “Every day I work on you, give me twenty-five tael. That buys my whole day. Can you do that?” 

“Sure.” If the artist was expecting push back on the price, none came. The rich boy made a pillow out of his stacked hands, resting his cheek atop a bed of knuckles and sinew. “If this is to be the whole day every time, then I will have food brought in. What do you like to eat?”

“A-po won’t have it, she’s very proud of her cooking.” Jin waved a hand as he turned back to Li, pausing for a brief moment of thought before he sat down cross-legged on the floor in front of that high-class boy laid nervous on his work bench. He leaned in to look him in the face once more, seeming to resume their earlier game. “And no: you do not have the face of a thief, Ren Li.”

“I know I don’t.” Li lifted his eyes to the artist, grin breaking the serious line of his collected expression. He was charmed, even if he didn’t rise to Jin’s game of re-escalation, quiet words artless in their closeness. “I just wanted to hear you say it.”

A soft silence settled into the contours of the snowdrift moment, disturbed only when Jin shifted and ruined the unspoken with an impulse he thought would either calm the noble’s nerves or get himself executed. He met Li’s mouth with his own, soft contact induced without warning by the subtle jutting of the working boy’s right-angle jaw.

Li remained frozen but unfleeting, taken aback but keen, supple beneath the sagacious manner that narrowed his eyes—audacious in the contradiction making him lean in. He was a prim response wrapped in the warmth of his discovered will, neck elongated until the lineations therein were taut: a tentative yes to an old question.

When Jin pulled away, he wore a riddle-master’s smug grin, boisterous thing so confident he could solve any and every problem that walked through his door. “So now you can stop being all weird when you walk in here,” Jin said, resting his chin on his arm laid flat against the worktop. Half mast eyes studied too close skin; he tilted his head. “Now you can relax and just let yourself be, okay?”

“Okay,” the eldest Ren conceded, earnest and serene. Li picked his own head up. He adjusted himself for a clearer view. “So—does that make us friend-friends now? Can I get that life story over the course of my visits or what?”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Jin replied, lingering for a moment longer, nose to nose, before he rose with a belaboured sigh, laying his caddy of tools on the workbench and taking a seat where Li’s slim waist left him the most room. “If you sit good, I’ll talk more. If you complain, I’ll talk less.”

“Hm. How bad is this going to hurt though—for real.” Li returned to a flatter state, settling back down upon his folded limbs, head tilted in the artist’s position.

With one hand on his substrate’s back, the artist picked a small obsidian bladed scalpel from his tool kit. “It’s going to hurt. I’ve got to dig out the lines that I’m re-laying—you might get some scarring, but I’ll cover them when they heal. You’re going to bleed. Oh.” Suddenly remembering, Jin shot off to some side door leading to a small, enclosed courtyard in the middle of that ramshackle house. When he returned, he had a carved wooden pail full of fresh water with a couple of clean rags draped over the side. “I almost forgot.”

“Ugh, alright.” Li steeled himself in the brief moment he was alone, recalling mantras from all the times he visited temple with Xiaoxu; he thought of all the techniques Xueyu passed on regarding being wounded and carrying on, suppressing pain for personal pride. The noble was calm and placid, awaiting the slice of the artist’s knife into his barely marred hide. 

“I’m ready,” he announced, regardless of whether or not it was wanted.

“Try not to move, okay?” The older boy’s voice was gentle, an attempt at comfort for the noble so willing to believe every word he said, so willing to believe in the fledgling skill of a poor savant. “It’ll be worth it, I promise.”

Lining up his blade against the edge of the largest tracer leading from the moonstone artifact between Li’s shoulder blades, Jin made his first incision.