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The first time Shang Qinghua met him again, properly , without people trying to take away tectonic plates between them, he's running with a treatment spray and patches of drying bleach on his apron, skidding to an awful stop before a God.
They do say capitalise the G in God. He lives his life religiously in seconding that sentiment. Faithfully, devotedly, in hapless awe-ly.
"Oh my gods," he wheezed, breath knocked out of him - the cause being this sudden God’s appearance or his own iron deficiency jumping him is unclear. "You're so hot" then slipped unbidden from his mouth, with no meaningful ways of countering the sentiment in a dignified and respectful manner to all parties.
Mobei-Jun, as he had found out previously through several rounds of information exchange and rigorous badgering with Sha Hualing, stopped in his stead, sharp scissors in hand.
Maybe it was a supposedly rude thing. Maybe it was a regional difference thing. Maybe Qinghua just has the habit to blurt out the rudest words at the most inconvenient times. Either way, the hot barber snarled at him, visibly menacing, as if he had insulted not only the other's patriarchal lineage but also insulted who he is as a person, spat on his core values and ran away with his five thousand dollars thinning scissors.
"I do beg your pardon," was the arctic tundra reply. "I am not hot ."
"No, no, of course not, my sincerest apologies -" he sputtered, hand waving in earnest despair and abject desolation. "Uh, I'm here to borrow some wax?"
Because this man and Shen Jiu know of each other, they share the same brand of passive aggressive grudging habits. His only guidance was a sole finger pointing to the product shelf with a blindingly minimalistic display of a lot of wax types and nothing else. Something in the tall and intimidatingly handsome face told him he better make it quick or die trying. He barely picked the right wax and scrambled out, before Liu Qingge can come and whoop his ass onto the pavement for him.
"See you, A-Yu,” he told the customer in the chair. “Sorry I called you hot!" He lifted an arm in an imitation of a farewell wave but in honesty it was probably more of a floundering arm before someone sinks into the bottom of the Mariana Trench. He heard nothing of Mobei-Jun and his snickering customer, whose hair got pulled in retaliation of his mocking laughter.
(Qinghua spent a good half of that week dropping balancing scales on his feet and hobbling into product shelves and mirrors, wearing a terrifiedly besotted look all the while.
Jiu-ge pointed a smoking curling iron in his face, lips thinning. “Can we just throw him away? Less useless staff to pay for.”
Cucumber Bro, the light of his life, tormentor and friend, Shen Yuan, had put a stop to the weekly consideration of Shang Qinghua’s nonexistent sacking, steering his brother away.)
-
It isn’t Jiu-ge who is sending him to be the errand boy to pop over to the Tundra, but it’s Cucumber Bro. The more presentable and fashionably adept twin, he had taken one look of Qinghua’s face and sent him off to ‘fix that menace on top of your head that you dare to call hair’. Shen Yuan might have the serene face of a refined Tang Dynasty scholar, but he’s mean about beauty standards - that is, if someone isn’t at his level, then that gives him leeway to gently torment them until they pass out from conflicted sobbing. He’d seen Ying-er and Luo Binghe sobbed and threw themselves at the guy’s feet. He’s not particularly keen to join the growing list of people that Shen Yuan drove to tears behind the flapping of his fan.
So here he is, in the waiting area at Tundra Barber Shop, trying to squint his way through the different range of hairstyles and partings so that his face isn’t perpetually the target of bullying from the Shen Twin Terrors, senior stylists at Qing Jing Beauty Salon. Hair alone won’t be able to change all that much, but as fellow hairdressers, they all have enough respect of good grooming to acknowledge objective beauty when they see it.
He struggles to see what precisely does Yue Qi and Luo Binghe see in the twin terrors, but that saying Love is blind probably doesn’t mean literally blind , but more like your questionable morals are excusable under my encompassing love for you.
But then he can’t talk. He historically met God when he was seventeen and on his way back home, when he stumbled upon the aftermath of a gang war, a sole surviving plastered on the ground, bruising. Mobei-Jun was less prettier when he’s beaten up black and blue, and Shang Qinghua was a twig who could barely pick up a tenth of his body weight, yet he lugged all of that teenage growing bones and muscles to a park bench to tend to his injuries. They really didn't get along at that first meeting, shoving and bickering as he forcefully tried to patch up the kid.
There was a lot of dialects involved, and the shameless exploitation of the Mum Voice. Mobei-Jun was shocked into sitting still and it was enough for Qinghua to patch him up to an acceptable standard.
They were mutual messes. They were communicating in a blender of dialects with tossed in English. He talked with his hands. Mobei-Jun glared as a form of communication. His hair back then was a mess of atrocious and frankly outrageous curls, so he's physically different from how he looked in the past.
Mobei-Jun was also inhumanly cold for some reason and if he had shamelessly cuddled in closer because of some brotherly concern then that's on him, shush now.
Looking at the moron fifteen-year-old post a bloody gang fight with a busted lip, his little teenager heartline went directly for the little pout on the demon's lower lip and he had placatingly sat by the boy's side for hours on end, until Mobei Jun gave in to both his silent and talkative nagging of Qinghua accompanying him to where he can rest up.
(It was less him actually nagging and just him wheedling a name out of the kid (Mobei-Jun) and him carelessly tossing out his own name when he found out that he's older, insisting that he was a senior and that will be Shang-gege to the brat, who halfheartedly rolled his eyes at him but didn't push him away from his side.)
"Well?" He gestured to the home with the tall and imposing gates. "In you pop. This gege can't take care of you any more than this. You're lucky I lug around an emergency first aid kit."
Mobei-Jun, with eyes as blue as ice and sharp as a cat, narrowed suspiciously at his easy admittance of the First Aid Kit.
He waved it away, shooing the boy in further. "Aiya, it's nothing big. I'm just prone to random injuries so it's helpful to have all the bits here to patch me up when I get hurt. Quit that look, brat, this gege won't die that easily."
In a fit of teenage stupidity and unrealistic romantic impulses, he promised, quite emptily - "I will follow you all of my life. You can't get rid of me that easily."
Mobei-Jun sucked in a choked breath.
"Okay," wheezed out the kid, barely the same height as him. Qinghua reckoned he has a few more years to hit his own growth spurt too. "You promised, Shang- gege."
Shang Qinghua didn't think too much of it, presuming that ah, that handsome rich young master won't miss this gremlin creature at all.
Wrong. Completely off the marks.
He moved to the mountains and down the seas, not of his own accord, but he eventually accepted his fate and began to just go with where life swings him along. Hairdressing had always been a path set out for him, so he jumped on that, chased after stylists, begging and thigh-hugging an embarrassing amount so that they can teach him techniques and the ways of hair. Promptly forgot about the little boy he patched up. Didn't keep his promise made so carelessly.
Through networks and sheer connections that he was thrust upon and into, he stumbled upon the news of an up and coming barbering franchise, spearheaded by Luo Binghe, the tiny little beansprout the Shen twins not so lovingly tutored and kicked out. Well, one loved the child and one didn't and everyone and their grandmother know how the odds are not in anyone's favours when Shen Jiu and Shen Yuan fight. Luo Binghe got booted, Shen Yuan was and continues to be disconsolate, and there is no end of it.
It was definitely a surprise for him to continue hearing about Luo Binghe and his right hand man, Mobei-Jun. Back then it would have been nearly ten years since Shang Qinghua last seen the kid and frankly all associations had petered out of his brain and down all drains. Good for them, he had deigned, and that had been it.
Then he met Sha Hualing, through the An Ding branch that he worked and eventually managed. She wanted to straighten out her hair and he made some ill-timed comments about his own sexuality and somehow that led to her returning visits to An Ding to get her hair done.
One thing led to another, and her good friend Luo Binghe came in one day to say hi to him, and also to task him with giving a hamper basket to Binghe's dearest Shizun.
Qinghua had a good feeling the kid didn't mean Shen Jiu.
So he styled hair on weekdays and ran correspondence between two old friends, which is careening into something more but he's not at liberty to communicate what or how more it is. Through sheer dumb luck alone, he was at a party, flanked by Ning Yingying and Liu Mingyan, both peering down at him critically.
"So," Yingying, galaxy buns, sweet and cutthroat, smiled down at him as she crowded him into a chair. "How do you know Luo Binghe?"
It's not even a crush thing. It's more he is a rival to our franchise and he was maybe behind that one arson case on our headquarters and you two are associating ?
It's also funny how nobody even peeped a word about Shen Yuan and Luo Binghe communicating, but maybe it's because Shang Qinghua was doing a mighty covert job at it so it's just him that's a scapegoat to all the wrongs of this world.
"I don't know him. I know his friend, and I most certainly just greet him when he comes along to his friend's appointments at An Ding," he vehemently refused and was prepared to stand up for his dignity when Hualing was shouldering her way past him, pausing when he called out, arms flailing.
Liu Mingyan squinted as Hualing loomed closer. "Wait, didn't I lose to you at that one tournament during internship?"
Hualing's smile was all teeth. "Hey, Liu."
Mingyan rightfully bristled, and refused to stand near her old opponent.
"What's wrong?" Hualing tipped a chin down at him, looking at Yingying. "What did he do now?"
Before his dignity can be further removed from his spine, he sprang up, gesticulating at Hualing.
"As I was saying, my good friend here -"
"Not a friend," Hualing immediately shot down.
"Well, this fantastic woman here -"
"Not a girl today either," Hualing interrupted, and took a cup of champagne as the waiter floated nearby.
Shang Qinghua's brain scrambled for something else. "Sha Hualing."
"That is my name," they lifted a slit eyebrow at him. "What, Shang-xiong?"
"You're acquainted with Master Luo. That's how he and I knew of each other," he fervently wrung his hands and Hualing, seeing no harm in it, gave a noncommittal shrug.
"That's true," they chugged down the flute of champagne. "Shang-xiong, when you're less drunk, I'll introduce you to someone. He said he's been looking for you for a while."
Mingyan, forgoing all grudges and past wrongs, because she chose to embark on journalism and dodgy erotica penning as her professions, shifted extremely close to Sha Hualing.
"Shang-ge? Why would anyone look for him?" Yingying tilted her head to one side. "Not that I'm saying anything mean by it, gege, it's just surprising. Normally people just show up and collect you. Not ask for you."
Sha Hualing shrugged, and pressed closer to Mingyan, pulling on her earrings.
"Guy said he forgot how this runt looks, so I'm bribed to collect and deposit the goods," they laughed as Mingyan batted them away and left in a huff to pester somebody else or to get more alcohol, whichever was more important.
"Who is this friend?" He squinted, because friend really sounded like sniper and he didn't really need death on an agenda when he was having such a nice time trying to replace his spine with the couch stuffings.
Sha Hualing reached out to pull onto Yingying's earrings next, shrugging.
"Young master Mo, I think. Don't know his full name."
Shang Qinghua straight up fainted.
From then on, he refused to come anywhere Hualing or Binghe, in the off chance that the kid actually made invitations clear that he was needed elsewhere, because he doesn't have a death wish. It was also lowkey insane. Why would Mobei-Jun, scrappy cold boy extraordinaire, spend so much energy to find equally scrappy and dodgy Shang Qinghua?
He told all of this to Mingyan, which, in hindsight, probably wasn't a good idea because she would have penned this all down in a story somewhere, but better her than anyone else.
Mingyan maybe probably had to cough up to her brother why Shang Qinghua was meeting up with her so much - that, or she just tells Liu Qingge everything. Anyone's guess, really. From Liu Qingge it went to his boyfriend-nearly-husband Mu Qingfang, and then it jumped to Shen Yuan.
Which was why he is here, today. Not because God had forsaken him. No, these morons thought they were helping him, but help by the hands of any Shen Twin Terror is synonymous with death, so excuse him as he prays to all the deities he knows, he's not coming out of this alive. Or in one complete piece.
"Shang-xiong?" The sweet-looking receptionist asks and he peels himself away from the chair, stepping towards his demise.
"That's me," he raises a hand.
"Excellent!" The receptionist beams. "Just right this way. The barber will attend to you very shortly."
He doesn't even have time to go tell them to take their time when he is deserted to his chair, all alone in the barbershop.
If he dies, he's haunting Shen Yuan until that one goes clinically insane from frustration.
-
Mobei-Jun is his barber and death had never been a more promising outlook on life. It's like a pairing directly imported from hell.
He’s this close from smashing his forehead onto a mirror and just bleed out from the resulting injuries. However, that might be a bit inconvenient on the OH&S regulations and bureaucratic hell follows one unto death and the beyond. He does not want his student debt to follow him even when he does end up dying, and no, as promising as expiring right here and now on this salon chair, he is not risking downright terror to student loans haunting him as he descended into hell.
Maybe it’s the glasses removal. Maybe it’s because his curls are, as previously stated, longer and wilder and tinted brown at the tips, growing haphazardly all over his head and curling around his ears, because the frighteningly tall barber nods at him, all professional, and clips on the wrap around his neck, not a sign of recognition on his perpetually impassive face.
Qinghua fervently prays for all the gods in existence and denial, hoping for a miracle to strike from the heavens, to no avail, as he stupidly pushes aside his bangs and makes direct eye contact with the barber who leans down to listen better to his soft-spoken request.
“Uh,” he says, intelligently, as Mobei-Jun’s eyes narrow fractionally. “Hey. Young Master Mo. Ice prince.”
Immediately there is this frightful snarl that expresses all the pent-up anger and indignity of all the years Qinghua spent actively not running into Mobei-Jun and avoiding him like the plague. His voice is ice. Everything is ice. Shang Qinghua might as well take a leaf out of Titanic’s book and run headfirst into an iceberg and sink for 120 years.
“Follow me forever, huh?” The man states, even. Deadly.
Qinghua grapples for words, but comes up with empty air, like usual. He would cry, but this situation is beyond the sphere of influence that piteous crying can incur. Plus, he has a foreboding that the moment that he starts crying, his teeth will be punched out and the fragments will be stringed up in a gruesome bead necklace as both a spoil of war and also as a warning. Because Mobei-Jun is multipurpose in his denunciation like that.
“Surprise?” He tries, and barely dodges out of the way of an elbow.
Surprisingly, he doesn’t get decked into next week. A heavy stare pins him down, removing all chances of escape from the shop, as he cowers further into his stool, hoping to become one with the furniture.
“Don’t move unnecessarily,” Mobei commands, succinctly. He gulps, doesn’t dare flinch, spine straightening on the barber stool. There is the off chance that his throat could be slit that easily if this barber has the faintest desire to indulge in his murder whims - and from personal experience, Qinghua knows the kid’s got stacks and stacks of that.
“Please don’t slit my throat,” he squeaks, eyeing the very sharp scissors showing sight from the scissor holder. “Blood is very hard to clean out.”
His tormentor and lowkey childhood rescuee narrows sharp eyes at him.
“You would know that from personal experience, now, wouldn’t you?”
He doesn’t know if the kid was referring to him bleeding all over Qinghua or just the rumours of Qinghua’s supposed association with organised crime. But that’s not important. “Uh,” he gulps, eyes going a bit wild as the spray bottle starts to emerge. “Yeah, sure, whatever that means.”
He deserved the harsh shower of cold and aggressive water spritzes from the spray bottle.
-
“What do you want to be done to your hair now?” Mobei-Jun pulls at a curl, as the lock of hair, aggressively gaining sentience to spring back closer to Qinghua’s head, makes a break for it from the barber’s grip. Shang Qinghua is terrified. He is scared clean out of his wits. He almost said just shave my hair, but then that’s just as bad as condemning himself to an eternity of dealing not only with his own debts, but the entirety of the Cang Qiong franchise’s extended, generational debt. He’ll never be able to reincarnate and forget about this nightmarish hell that is reality.
“Shen Junior just said Make it neat and make it pretty, to be completely honest with you,” he shrugs, shoulders swallowing his chin and cheek. “I’m not too sure what that entails but I’m not too fussed, so as long as we don’t draw blood or shear me like a sheep, I’m all yours.”
Mobei-Jun is still staring at him, hard.
He starts to fidget, shoulders moving, fingers winding into the wrap and wearing the material thin by sheer nervous energy.
“What’s wrong with it?” He tentatively inquires, as the silence stretches on.
“Nothing,” Mobei-Jun returns, voice icy. “There’s nothing inherently wrong with it. Just long and untidy. I can clean up the fringe and shorten the length, but I don’t see an inherent flaw with how you’re styling it.”
"Huh,” he squints through a stray fringe, curling onto itself. “I thought it was unsightly. Well, I don’t think that - the Shen twins drill it into my head and I just went with it. You know hairdressers. We just make ourselves barely presentable to make other people pretty. That’s the story of my life.”
His hair is a physical mockery of everything he had denied in regards to him meeting Mobei-Jun, that is - he denied over and over again that he had forgotten the kid and they won’t meet again, yada yada, then he goes and keeps his hair the same, even though he wanted...something to happen with the hair. Maybe he can keep an offhand physical reminder that he didn’t make up the kid. Maybe with this hair, he’s more easily identifiable if they do run into each other again. Maybe - maybe -
Maybe Shen Yuan was sick of him silently moping for years on end and decided to send him off to the butcher and snip off the thorn by the collective Cang Qiong’s side. He had begged and badgered and prostrated before the Shen Twin Terrors and Big Boss Man Himself, Yue Qingyuan, to no avail.
All the jokes are on him now. Not only is he forced to depart from his decade-long, familiar hairstyle, but he is faced with the very same face he had relentlessly been avoiding despite his hair communicating otherwise. He’s going to die. Expire on this chair. Nothing can stop him now.
“You still look the same,” Mobei-Jun stares, turning to unsheathe shiny scissors.
The implied Why rings loud and incriminating by his ears.
“Just give me an undercut,” he bemoans, even though he hates undercuts with every inch of his being, which isn’t a lot, but it’s still a considerable few. “I want to look like an entirely new bean.”
A strand of hair is tugged, not harshly, but to bring attention to the frown that is ever present around his head. He knows what he had done. He swerved the question, and with negative grace at the act.
“Kept it the same because it’s familiar to me,” he mumbles, as scissors snip off the length, head gently eased out of him hunching his neck into his shoulder.
“Because?” Metals glide across each other, oils from cleaning smoothing out the harsh metal from clashing with each other.
He would have been honest, but deep down, he is a coward, so he took a page out of The Ways On How To Nie Huaisang. “I don’t know,” he says, with the finality of closing arguments.
Works like fucking squat on Mobei-Jun, where tones of voice bounce off him like water glides off seals. Completely useless. Complete squat.
“Liar,” the boy - no, man, now, he’s Huge - bigger than Shang Qinghua as opposed to the good old days where he’s on eyesight level with this battered and bruised punk. Another tug. Almost plaintive. “Tell me the truth.”
The things that they’re familiar with - silence and unconventional affection - communicate more than the easy lies Shang Qinghua slip through in casual conversations. Mobei-Jun is the one who trades in silence and punches, of course, but that is Shang Qinghua too - and in these stretches of silence that he is the most honest. What he does not say is of pertinence, and what Mobei says is equally as significant.
Their meeting had been blearily cut short and filled with initial scuffling where he got a boot to the ribs and elbow to the face. That was self-defence. Shock and fear at his appearance, because he could have been there to harm the famed first son of the Great Northern Empire Group - totally understandable. If he was famous, he’d fear for his safety too.
But that melted into something else - less violent and blood-inducing, more to annoy than to harm. Unconventional - he joked that Mobei looked like he was pummelling Qinghua to the bench by his attempt of a thank you hug, and he got an actual punch in return.
These hair tugs are annoying at best and absolutely weak for someone who grew into his six foot plus height - they probably hold no significance for anyone else but them.
Shang Qinghua associates violence as well as gruff tenderness to his Mobei-Jun, the kid he saved and in turn, saved him - and this hair tug meant something. It’s akin to a little kid pulling on their carer’s sleeve, asking them a silent question.
What is there to say that hasn’t been exposed to the table - he’s been properly called out, clear and proper, and his words will only bolster the massive fuck up that he himself carved out and shoved himself in it.
“What don’t you know,” he petulantly curls his lips, straightening up as the scissors thin under his skull, shortening the length significantly. “And are you actually giving me an undercut?”
“Your hair was fine,” Mobei-Jun states. It’s there. It’s succinct. It’s saying more than what was communicated. “Your request was vague at best, but I’ll work something out.
He might as well have been punched.
It’s not an I forgive you, because his Mobei-Jun holds grudges to the grave and beyond that, but it’s not an outright refusal to work with lowly scum Shang Qinghua who abruptly ditched him without a word. He’s worse than even villainous Shen Jiu who slam kicked Luo Binghe to the kerb. Literally. With his Armani boots. It was an entire spectacle.
Silence, and he was keeping still so that there was no metal near his skin, keeping still. Maybe if he pretends to be dead -
Nope
“You never answered my question.”
Whoop. There it is.
“What is there to say,” he cowers at the hair tug again. Ow. It looks gentler on television, when the male lead pulls this stunt on the female lead. In a random fit of guilt, he sends a silent and quick prayer to all the female leads in his stories that he subjected this cruel form of showing affection to. It not only hurts, but also deeply humiliating to both parties. Just tap each other on the shoulders normally, damn, why do you have to pull on hair. It hurts!
The tug relents on his hair, and he has too late of the much needed realisation that Oh no, I talk out loud when I’m under intense stress.
“I’ll stop,” Mobei-Jun declares. “When you tell me why you’re here.”
He twitches a little. “I’m here because of forces which are beyond my control and they wear faces of the Twin Terrors. I’m here under duress. I also didn’t know you would be here.”
Metals cease snipping. He reevaluates his sentence. It sounds like something foolish to say. It sounds distinctly Shang Qinghua-esque. Smack bang in his personality description. That’s something people expect him to pull.
“Not that I would have necessarily ran if I do know you’re here - I just, ah - am embarrassed to run into you again?” Excuses, and then reasons.
“You don’t have a shred of shame to your name,” Mobei-Jun ruthlessly spins the chair around and he is left with no choice but to make uncomfortable eye contact with one who has sharp scissors pressed near his ears. “Why would it matter with me?”
Really! This only son who has limited interactions with other people can’t really read the fine lines between everything at all! Must he spell everything out in its entirety?!
“Because it’s you!” He squeezes his eyes shut, mouth just running free all the words he should have said in goodbye all those years ago but didn’t. “Because it’s you and I somehow care more about your opinions of this lowly gege even though I left and -”
Hand under chin, fingers gripping jaw. His head is tilted back, as the teeth of the comb brush through his ruffled fringe.
“Um,” his eyes pop open, as the fingers tighten on his jaw.
“Close your eyes. Unless you want hair in them,” is the soft admonition, none of the bitterness or bite in them.
He does the sensible thing. He closes his eyes.
"Stupid,” comes the rant, though he knows that it will be short-lived. “Why would I care or have lowly opinions of you before all the facts are established?”
“You didn’t think I left you because I wanted to?” He asks. He doesn’t know the answer to that query himself.
“You’re too much of a coward to stay when there is a threat present - and even though you made empty promises,” fingers leave faint imprints on his jaw and brush his bangs aside, tugging on an errant curl. “I didn’t once think that you’re capable of leaving without a word of explanation to someone you’re so obvious in openly ogling.”
His eyes spring open as protests pile on his tongue and his hands curl into loose fists to pound at a shoulder in defence of his besmirched dignity, not that he has any to spare in the first place.
“Don’t call me out like that,” he pouts, fists coming to barely any weight on Mobei-Jun’s shoulder.
“Then don’t run away,” the barber slants an unimpressed look down at him. “Up. Have a look.”
He stands, but keeps a distrustful eye on Mobei-Jun’s looming form all the while.
Ah.
Well.
That’s -
“I kinda look the same?! Just neater?”
Mobei-Jun’s fingers curl into his jumper, resting across the junction where neck meets shoulder. “Well I like it.”
“That’s not relevant? I’m going to get killed? By Shen Junior?”
“Then just come by my place. I’ll provide asylum there.”
Unfortunately, there isn’t an appropriate retort to that proposition because the receptionist returns, informs them that there are myriads of clients and he, Shang Qinghua, needs to be moving along. He is ushered away, bundled up in a coat that is two sizes too big on him, as he waits outside in the cold, because his one instruction had been an amicable ‘Wait. Or else.’
He dreads what Or else entails and he has a high sense of self-preservation, unlike what others may think. He’s going to wait.
The back door to the staff room bursts open and Mobei-Jun strides out, zero coat on, in subzero temperatures. Shang Qinghua feels the brotherly instincts he doesn’t have rise at a considerably tsunami-esque level, as he wrangles off the coat he has on him to Mobei-Jun, who declines it with a sharp look.
“Wear it,” he dictates, rather than requests.
“It’s freezing?” He squeaks, as he’s forced back inside the cocoon of the coat’s fur lining.
“It’s colder in my hometown. Where is your stop?”
He has zero time to appropriately respond to everything happening all at once, as his hand is yanked forcefully and stowed away in a pocket, with Mobei-Jun walking in a random direction that’s not the train station, and he has to drag them to the right route.
“Why are you walking me here?” He asks, stop looming ahead.
“So you don’t run away again,” is the cold affirmation. “And also, when are you free next week?”
Qinghua answers before he processed everything. “Thursday, after 6, why?”
“Do you know that restaurant by the riverside? Meet me there at 6.45.”
“Yeah,” he blinks, then it hit him, “kid, it’s really hard to book a reservation there.”
Mobei-Jun flicks a wrist up, watch snug against his arm. “Not if I call in before 3. Off you go.”
Is this - what - what is this development? Is he to believe that it’s -
“Mobei-Jun!” He screams, in the same vein as Mobei-Jun stating evenly. “Shang-gege.”
“What,” he frowns. “Tell me what you wanted to say first.”
“No,” Mobei Jun insists. “You.”
“This is no time to be pulling UNO reverse on me -”
“Shang-gege is older, so he should express his sentiments first before his time runs out.”
“Brat -” he snarls, and hears the coming train. “I’ll properly apologise at the dinner, but Mobei Jun. My scrappy cold boy extraordinaire. I promised you once, and I’ll promise again - I’ll follow you for the rest of my life. I intend to uphold that, with what’s left of my shame.”
Mobei Jun’s face is an impassive one, eyes hard and face sharp as the windows of the train carry Shang Qinghua away.
“Don’t leave me again, Shang-gege,” he had told Qinghua, and somehow, he thinks the heavenly forces won’t be able to win against Mobei Jun if there is ever a smack down and they need to wrench Shang Qinghua from the grip of this one.
He still has Mobei-Jun’s coat snug around his shoulders. It feels like an embrace from the ice prince.