With his knees in the dirt, stray strands of rust-colored sunbleached hair falling into his face from where it escaped his braid, Lin leaned down to kiss his royal lover. He’d drug Yuhui across the ground with his whirlwind hello, scraped him through the mountain woods with his violent I missed you so, but now, still fully sheathed in Yuhui’s trembling warmth, Lin was a softer creature. He basked in the prince’s mere presence, so happy simply witnessing his sunset boy again.
“I’d never let you go,” he murmured between his racing breath, his affectionate little kisses. The mercenary’s cheeks were ruddy for the exertion of his proclamations, scrawled into the leaf cover of the forest ground. “Even if I did die in that avalanche, I’d have ripped my ghost from my core’s grasp to wander this world and find you.”
Yuhui’s chest was a constant rise and fall, ribs moving beneath his pristine skin, lungs diligently working to recapture the air that’d been pounded out of him. His own hair was a mess, a splash of black tainted with sticks and leaves, and his cheeks were smeared with dirt. Lower, his shins marred by the brown of a rich forest’s soil. The middle prince was spread out beneath his lover, legs splayed and unashamed of their obscene deeds. Yuhui didn’t care for the world turning well above their heads, he only cared about Lin’ai, the feel of him still twitching in his night, the smell of him—of them—permeating the landscape.
“I’d welcome your haunting—” he sighed. “But I’m much happier with you alive.”
“Me too,” Lin’ai grinned. “I’d make a shitty ghost. I’d be really mad about not being able to touch anything.”
Pushing himself up to sit on his heels, he smoothed his hands down Yuhui’s body. The sellsword held the prince by the hips as he thrust forward hard one last time, eager to hear every lewd yelp he could draw from a never-sated throat.
“Fuck—” Yuhui hissed on an exhale, lifting a leg to flex against the Gui boy’s side. His own climax glistened across his abdomen like some Rorschach splattering of a ransom note love letter, pale paint in the day’s soft spread of sun. “Well, if you’re so hungry for touch, you can spend the rest of the afternoon picking every single stick and leaf part out of my hair.”
“Naw.” Lin was a rakish tease, a taunting grin riding high on his pretty features. “It’s a good look on you.” Grudgingly, the mercenary pulled out slow; he crawled out from between Yuhui’s knees and all but collapsed next to his lover on the ground, looking up at the gently rustling treetops high above them.
The prince’s over exaggerated pout didn’t last long. It quickly dissipated as he rolled over and made himself comfortable at Lin’s side, arm draped lazily across his boy’s chest. “I hate that I have to say goodbye to you today. When I get back to Fanxing, after the Millipede and all that mess, you’re going to spend all your time with me, okay?”
“You’re gonna spend all your time with me,” the boy corrected, happy to pull Yuhui closer. “I don’t wanna get stuck in that palace all day, every day.”
“So contrary,” Yuhui hummed, grin tugging at a corner of his mouth. “What’re we going to do then?”
“I’mma take you to see the ceaseless sea.” Lin’s announcement was matter-of-fact. “I wanna compare you, side by side, to a sunset over the water–see who’s more vibrant reflected against the clouds, sinking beneath the waves.”
“You better not look at the sky the same way you look at me.” The prince smiled in the face of his threat, smoothing a hand over his lover’s chest fondly. “I’ll fight the clouds. I’ll split the sun and let it bleed into the horizon. I’ll threaten the stars so they cower at the very sight of me.”
“I shouldn’t tell you about how I saw the sky lookin’ at me then,” Lin replied coy, chin tucked as he pushed himself up to his elbows. He kissed the crown of Yuhui’s head, then his forehead. “I definitely wouldn’t want to see you exact that kinda violence on the heavens because of me.” His tone, however, hinted that he absolutely would.
“That’s right. You keep it to yourself unless you want to live in eternal darkness.” Yuhui shifted, looking up at Lin’ai. “Loquat is going to be so happy to see you. I think she misses you so much still. She always sings your song.”
“Are you up here until the day of the fight?” The mercenary’s question came on a mercurial lilt. “Quan is making me and Ao fight on his team. Just tell me what you need me to do and I’ll torch him.”
“We’re up here for the rest of the week, so yeah, pretty much.” The middle Tian sat up, gathering his knees in the circle of his arms. “I don’t know that I need you to do anything if you said you and your brother aren’t going to try to win the challenge. I think just hearing that might make my brother feel a little more at ease. We all kinda figured that Feng Quan will be the biggest obstacle aside from the Millipede itself.” Yuhui looked aside. “Do you know who else is going to be on the Feng team?”
“Ma Yixun is in, one hundred percent. I don’t know who the fifth is. He can hire whoever he wants, you know?”
Yuhui nodded. “Yeah. Well, hopefully it doesn’t matter.” Absentmindedly, the boy began to pick anomalies out of his hair. He combed his fingers through his bangs, pushing out leaves, watching them fall back to the forest floor. “I missed you so much, Lin. I really am so happy you came to see me.”
Deeply contrarian, Lin began putting the fallen leaves back in Yuhui’s hair. “How could I stay away? How could I live my life without knowing where we stood?” Looking down, that cavalier boy fell suddenly sober. “You gonna be okay? You said you started seeing another guy. I dunno if it would actually help but I could stay a night if you need some support… Or if you just wanted me around.”
The prince affectionately lashed out at the mercenary, shoving him away with a laugh.
“It’s okay. I’ll be okay,” he said after a moment. “There are four of us in the room Master Xueyu gave us, so it’s already kinda packed. I should focus on talking to Laike anyway. I’m not sure we’re anything official, but we did mess around and I was pursuing him so I need to let him know the circumstances have changed. Not looking forward to hurting him, but I suppose there’s no way to get around it.”
Mocking hurt that Yuhui didn’t want his leaves, Lin sat up more fully, elbows on his knees. “Is he on your brother’s team?”
“No, he’s just helping us train. We’re waiting for Ren Fei to come from the palace to fill out our team. I don’t know if you heard what happened but it was—” The prince paused, biting his lip as he considered his words. “It was an ordeal.”
Lin’ai didn’t know much about the situation because there were so many stories skittering around the gossip gutters in Fanxing. Lin knew full well that stories were stories: more often than not, they hardly reflected the lives they were based on. “I didn’t see anyone on the road up,” the mercenary offered instead. “Maybe he took another way.”
“Maybe. He was busted up very badly, so I would not be surprised if he is delayed.” Yuhui rested his cheek on top of his knees, head angled aside to watch Lin’ai through love-softened lids.
Pretty thing with his narrow eyes, impish and always quietly crooning some old-world love song, rose to his knees and leaned in, kissing Yuhui’s cheek. He’d have to salvage his clothes from the dirt soon: they could only roll around naked amongst the tree roots for so long before someone came around and discovered them in their shocking undress. “Enough of that though. Tell me, yes or no: you wanna go someplace when this is over? You wanna run away for a minute? I’ll bring you back. I promise.”
The prince was quick, unwinding to snatch that boy by the braid and keep him. His words rushed whisper-soft onto Lin’ai’s lips. “With your brother or just you and me?”
Lin drug his hand across the ground, bringing up more leaves to deposit into his lover’s hair as he sweetly answered: “Just you and me.”
“Yeah, I’ll go with you,” Yuhui smiled. “Even if you are a big jerk.”
“I’m your big jerk who loves you very, very much,” Lin’ai cooed, grin inseparable from his trickster face.
“I love you too, Lin.” Yuhui dropped the braid and cupped the boy’s cheeks instead, bringing their lips closer together, delaying his return to the mountain’s complex with the sweet beginnings of another kiss.
Yuhui walked slowly back to the Luanshi complex after kissing his returned lover goodbye and wishing him a safe trip back to the city. His hands were busy in his hair, finally shaking off the detritus Lin’ai insisted he keep, as the sun was beginning to set behind the sharp angles of mountain roofs glistening with coal-dark tiles. The middle prince was due to have the artifact Jiling pulled for him inset that evening, however his heart was currently heavy with a greater burden than the upcoming challenge for the Millipede. Yuhui wanted to talk to Laike before he did anything else. His bodywork would be painful but that pain would fade quickly—a pain lingering in the heart and mind was always more difficult to overcome.
He turned to head toward the dormitories, already searching for the shadowboy in every face that passed him.
At the crossroads between the path Yuhui traveled up to the dormitories and the path leading to the student’s food hall, Laike ambled easy down the path as he took bites of the steamed bun in his hand. He carried a few additional items taken from the cafeteria tied up in a simple linen square, its knot held in his free hand. As soon as he saw Yuhui, the shadowstalker frowned. There were no shadows in his immediate vicinity so he stopped short of the intersection to turn back toward the path running along the cliff’s edge. He was suddenly quite eager to take the long way back to Chen and his room. The main path no longer seemed an attractive option.
“Oh! Laike!” Yuhui called out, pace quickening in pursuit. “Laike, I need to talk to you.”
Stopping with a hard swallow, that shadowless boy took a deep breath. The last thing he wanted was to speak to the prince but what choice was there? In the grand scheme of their world, who was Laike but an orphan? What choice did he have but to bow to the painful whims of a royal?
Laike paused but he didn’t turn, fist clenched tight around the knotted cloth he held in his hand.
Yuhui stopped a few paces behind the fighter, hands resting easy at his side. He was silent for a few moments that seemed to stretch longer than the seconds they lasted when meticulously kept against the heavy ticking of his nervous heart, searching for the words to start the explanation of his situation.
“So… When Jiling gathered me to see that visitor who came from the city, it wasn’t who I was expecting to see.” Yuhui looked down to the floor and the back up to his friend’s back. “I—I know I made some promises to you earlier, I said a lot of things that I really meant, but—” He sighed, fingers coming together, clumsily fumbling in his own grasp. “Well, the person who came to see me was the boy I used to see and I thought he was dead, but it turns out he’s alive and I would have never done anything with you if I knew that he was still living and—hey, can we talk face to face?”
“I don’t want to look at you, my Prince,” Laike said softly, measured and slow. He had a threat radiating off his back like spines, dangerous boy full of pinpricks and knives. “I’ve already seen what your promises look like, what your loyalty looks like. I saw enough to know that I was a mistake. You do not need to trouble yourself further. I already understand.”
Laike took another step up the path, closer to a cluster of shadow he could escape into.
Yuhui’s expression turned confused. “O…kay? But you weren’t a mistake. I don’t regret you, in fact I still really like you, but things were not as they seemed and I’m so sorry that I didn’t know the truth of the situation before I tried to be close to you. I’m very sorry that I hurt you, Laike. You don’t have to accept my apology, but I want you to know that it comes from the depths of my heart.”
“I saw you. I saw you together before you left with him.” Laike looked back over his shoulder, cold in the early evening starlight, the warm glow of Jiling’s rise-and-fall electric pathlights. “I do not doubt my Prince’s apology comes from the depths of his heart but it’s not difficult to drag up the floor of an ornamental pond, when one can see the bottom from the edge. I am at fault. I should have known better when my Prince’s attention was so forthright.”
As the words sunk in, Yuhui’s eyes fell to the floor again and he nodded. He turned to look for the direction of the tracer pavilion, eager to take himself away from further insult. “Alright. Goodnight, then.”
Brusquely, Laike turned away and disappeared into shadow, leaving Yuhui alone in the night, surrounded only by the distant chittering voices of disciples unaware of his pain.