Chapter Text
When Chang Huasen is eleven years old, he watches a pretty boy eat strawberry ice cream at the corner of their neighbourhood alleyway.
The boy is eight years old-- three years younger than him --, and his name is Sun Yinghao, and he has big brown eyes and a mouth that flattens out when he smiles and more scrapes on both of his knees than Huasen ever thought he could have in his life. He’s also very pretty, he notices right away, and part of him immediately wants to go over and say hi, introduce himself like his mom told him he should, share his toy action figures with him, whatever.
He’s shy though, something his eleven year old brain knows very clearly already, so instead, he watches from behind a tree as the pretty boy waves at two other boys walking towards him from down the street. The pretty boy has a plastic bag with something pink behind its blurred surface, and a bit of it is leaking out of some rip at the bottom of the bag. He doesn’t think Sun Yinghao notices though, and even if he did, he doesn’t pay it much attention compared to the brilliant, gap-toothed smile he shoots at his friends running towards him.
“I have ice cream!” he cries happily at them, and fishes the pink, gooey things out of his hands. His friends surround him, each taking one, giggling with delight at the stickiness and bright colours as they peeled paper away from strawberry frosting.
“Why do you always get strawberry flavour?” one of them asks Yinghao, pouting a bit. “I thought you said you would get red bean this time.”
Yinghao laughs, his eyes curling up into crescent moons. Huasen shifts in his spot behind the tree, little fingers fiddling with the toy in his hands. His favourite flavour is vanilla. “It’s sweet! And pink! And my mom told me that strawberries are the fruits of love.” He bats his eyelashes dramatically. “I like love.”
His friends shriek at him, grossed out, and Yinghao laughs with the rest of them as the boys pace down the street to the big pond at the park at the end of their neighbourhood. Huasen watches them leave, his cheeks warm and his stomach bubbling all over the place.
***
“Mom,” he asks his mother, later on that night. “How did you meet daddy again?”
His mother sighs as she smooths her hand through his hair. “I’ve told you this before, haven’t I, Huahua?”
“Yes, but I want to hear it again.”
“Your daddy and I are soulmates , honey,” his mom says, patiently. She runs her hand through his hair again. It feels very nice, and he leans into it. “It means that someone out there thought we were good for each other, and let us be together.”
Huasen blinks. “Did they tell you?”
“Oh no, honey. Not everyone has a soulmate. Actually, most people don’t. It’s just a few lucky people who get to have them. And even for the people who do have them, very often do they just never meet them, and even if they do, they usually don’t realize they’re their soulmate until very much later on.”
“How do they realize, then?” he asks her. His head is spinning.
His mother laughs softly, running her hand through his hair yet again. “You’ll know, honey, if they’re the one for you. You’ll know, and you’ll know they’re your soulmate. It doesn’t matter who they are; you’ll just know that they’re meant to be yours.”
“Okay.” He wiggles out from under his mother’s arms and twists his hands together. “Can we get ice cream today?”
“Right now?” she raises her eyebrows. “It’s not too hot, is it?”
“Yes, but can we? Please?”
She sighs, but turns around to take her coin pouch from off their kitchen counter. “I suppose it can’t be helped.”
Huasen puts his hand in hers and she squeezes it. “Vanilla cone as always, with caramel?”
Huasen thinks for a moment, thinking of the pretty boy’s little sticky hand around his pink cone, and his pretty, sparkling eyes from down the street. “I think … I want something different this week.”
“Oh?” She looks surprised. “What flavour then?”
“Strawberry.”
***
Twenty-four year old Chang Huasen thinks that Dachang, when you get over the initial beauty of the architecture outsides, and the novelty of the prestige and dreams associated with it, is not a really comfortable place after all.
His mother had warned him. You’re going to lose so much weight. They won’t let my boy eat! she had bemoaned to him over the phone, a week before he walked into the doors and promptly got his phone taken away from him for good. And you’re going to cry and I won’t be there to comfort my baby.
He still feels embarrassed when he thinks about it. He doesn’t cry that easily, does he?
No, not that easily.
He doesn’t cry when he’s placed in the N class for performances, because even though he’s a bit disappointed by it, there are so many other people around him, all bursting with talent and sparkling with their dreams in their eyes. There’s the flexible, graceful Luo Yizhou. The already-famous, determined Yu Jingtian (or is it Tony?). The sweet but passionate Lian Huawei, who cracks jokes all the time about being on an IQIYI show for the second time already.
But there’s also Sun Yinghao, and he looks so similar to how he did as a kid, only prettier.
Huasen never talked to the pretty boy with the strawberry ice cream in the end. Watched him, sometimes, with two toys in his hands, hoping to get the courage to talk to him? Yes, definitely. Talk to him briefly when his friends converged with Yinghao’s friends on hot, slow summer mornings? Probably. Walked past him as he was coming back from the supermarket, and Yinghao was bustling there, tying his hair back into a ponytail? Once, yes.
Sun Yinghao had let his hair grow out in his teenage years, and Huasen’s friend once commented that he looked like a girl. Not really in a sniggering, mean way, but just a comment teenage boys who are growing too fast and don’t really know how they’re supposed to look might make.
Huasen had looked at him back then, very carefully.
He didn’t think he looked like a girl. He thought he was prettier than a girl.
And he still was, pink sweater draped across his skinny shoulders, hair bunched up in a soft roll on his head. There were some things different, for sure, like how he now had make up on -- gentle, red hues smeared around his eyes that made them seem even larger than they already were. His face was narrower than it was when he was a kid, his nose high and delicate, and Huasen thinks that the panes of his jaw are a lot more defined than ever before. And he dances now. He really dances.
Yinghao dances, and he’s put into the A class for it. Deservedly so; Huasen doesn’t know how he would describe Sun Yinghao’s dancing, but in the little private corner of his brain, he thinks that the man dances like he’s a flickering flame, burning with passion and so much heat that he can almost feel it.
“Chang Huasen?” Yinghao asks him, carelessly, a few days after they’d both been assigned to their respective classes.
Huasen blinks. He almost drops his food tray. “Me?”
“Yes, you.” Yinghao looks down at his tray. “Don’t tip your hands too much to the right. You’ll drop your broccoli.”
Huasen quickly readjusts himself. “I don’t like broccoli that much.”
“No one likes broccoli.” Yinghao snorts, before nodding at him. “I’m Sun Yinghao.”
“I know that,” he tells him. “A class.” Yinghao raises his eyebrows.
“Well, I knew your name and class too, so that saves us an introduction, doesn’t it?” Yinghao hums. “Chang Huasen. N class.”
His voice sounds so similar to how he sounded as a kid, all sweet and light and poised with a certain intensity that drew the neighbourhood kids to him everywhere he went. Huasen had seen it -- how many friends he had --, and it was so different to how shy and quiet he was growing up.
“How do you know me?” Huasen asks him, as they make their way to a table. He can see the Yuehua boys there -- Tang Jiuzhou, Zhang Jingyun, and Liu Qi -- chattering away amongst each other (Jiuzhou is making the other two laugh, he thinks). A part of him hopes that Yinghao will say we were neighbours, silly! but he knows that the other boy won’t.
Sun Yinghao tilts his head to the side, pursing his lips dramatically before popping it back into place, as if a lightbulb had lit up in his head. “You were playing basketball with some of the other boys, weren’t you?”
“Oh, that?” They take a spot at the end of the table. “Yeah, that was me.”
Yinghao grins wide. “I knew it!” He looks around, then leans close to him. “You were the cutest one, so I had to remember you.”
Huasen jerks back. “What?”
Yinghao laughs loudly, clinking his metal chopsticks against the metal tray. His laugh isn’t as sweet as he looks; in fact, it’s bright and loud and he hiccups at the end of it almost like he’s swallowing his delight back into himself. Huasen kind of loves it, though.
“You’re so easy to tease!” Yinghao finally says, delighted. He pinches a broccoli into his mouth. “You’re so cute. And so easy to mess with. I love it.”
Huasen feels his face redden and his stomach flip on top of itself, a lot like how it had when he first saw Sun Yinghao on the streets of their neighbourhood. He considers, for a moment, telling Yinghao that they had lived in the same neighbourhood, but then decides against it. Yinghao hadn’t remembered him; really, he had never wanted to get to know him in the first place, even if Huasen had mooned over him in his childhood years like some sort of creep every time the pretty boy passed him in the street.
“We’re five minutes into our first conversation, and you’re already pushing it.” Huasen complains, deciding to fight fire with fire.
“That’s just who I am.” Yinghao tosses his long hair back, purses his eyebrows at him. “You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to.”
He’s still teasing him, and, somehow, Huasen doesn’t feel weird at all about it. Maybe he should (and in his head, he should feel at least a bit put off by how easily Yinghao’s words roll off his tongue, silvery and bubbly and bright). But maybe it’s because, technically, this isn’t the first time they’ve met.
“Eat your broccoli and tell me about yourself,” he tells him, popping one into his mouth and chewing exaggeratedly. “Or I might just stop after all.”