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Xue Yang remembers in his sleep. A lifetime of cart wheels and lingchi and sliced out tongues and a blind man’s incessant laughter comes flooding back all at once, all jumbled up so he can’t even tell how far apart the dull pain of his arm flying off was supposed to be from the rawness of his throat back when he screamed and screamed and screamed at a corpse that wouldn’t move. It takes him a long time to realize he actually feels that rawness now, even longer to notice he has his face pressed against the chest of one of the other group home kids.
"Have you calmed down?" a soft voice rumbles under his cheek. Xue Yang’s head is full of cotton and pounding, and he doesn’t feel like pulling away from the hand stroking his hair just yet. He heaves a shuddering breath and tilts his face up to look, and thinks if there were just a red dot right there and a fakeass smile.
"Feeling better?" Jin Guangyao asks again. Xue Yang shakes his head. "Let me up, I’ll fetch you some water," he adds, like it didn’t even matter how Xue Yang answered.
"I want sweets," Xue Yang croaks at him, and there comes the smile after all. Jin Guangyao daintily extracts himself from Xue Yang’s hold, slips off Xue Yang’s tiny-ass orphan bed, and heads off down the hall towards the kitchen. Xue Yang scrubs at his face with the edge of his nightshirt and tails him with a wet sniff.
Meng Yao is only three years older than Xue Yang, but already heading into his second year of college. Even with no financial support and no special attention from teachers, he clawed his way tooth and nail into a “good education,” and when a stranger who owed him a favor showed up to take him away to some far-off college dorms, Xue Yang figured he was ditching the group home for good, the first chance he got. Meng Yao played nice enough and never talked big, but everyone, even the caretakers knew: he wanted nothing to do with the whole place. He looked down on every last one of them.
But during his breaks in the school year, he came back.
That wasn’t too weird, either. He wasn't a legal adult yet. Once he was no longer in the group home’s custody, he’d be gone.
Now he's eighteen, and here he is again, fixing Xue Yang a glass of water in the kitchen sink.
Xue Yang pulls a knife out of a drawer and levels the tip at Jin Guangyao’s spine.
"Jin Guangyao, what are you playing at?" he sings. Jin Guangyao doesn't even look right away. He finishes filling the glass, sets it aside on the nearest counter, and only then does he turn his head to peer impassively up at Xue Yang, around the fake gold wire rims of his cheap prescription glasses.
"Fetching water," he answers in a smooth voice, like Xue Yang asked him a fucking math question. If Xue Yang didn't know where to look to spot the flint buried in his gaze and the tension bleeding into his perfect, perfect posture, he could have nearly passed for bored. He's probably too used to knives at his back.
Xue Yang bares his teeth at him, too. "What, out of the goodness of your heart? Come on, we both know you want something."
Jin Guangyao reaches behind himself to push the knife aside, so he can turn around and say, "There's no need to be so unpleasant, just because I saw you crying."
Xue Yang realizes his wrist is trembling once it's braced in Jin Guangyao's still hand. He shakes it off with a scowl and a "Fuck you" that comes out more hoarse than he'd like.
His head is stuffed too full. There's too much that happened all at once just now, and too much going on in Jin Guangyao's impenetrable skull all the time. Xue Yang only really knows where he is because he can focus on Jin Guangyao, in the here and now, dredging him up out of the years of fog and tying him down to this shoddy, lifeless place instead, and even that gets hazy, like he could turn around and spot Meng Yao's grody hooks from back in his Wen days hung up somewhere.
Meng Yao ended up at the group home when Xue Yang was around nine. The rest of them were all there from infancy, and this new kid was some scrawny nerd, at that, so of course he was immediately a weirdo, an outsider. The caretakers took his side a lot, but even if they had eyes on the backs of their heads, there was no way they could have kept him from getting picked on every time. Xue Yang joined in, too; he snuck into the older kids' room one day to find Meng Yao’s bed and shredded his pillow as Meng Yao watched.
"Sleep well!" Xue Yang cackled, and bounded out the door.
He peaked back in later when there was a commotion at Meng Yao's room, to find Meng Yao being questioned about why one of his roommates' pillows was a torn up mess. Meng Yao's own bed and even the floor around it were pristine, like he had really gone and picked up every last tuft of filling when he switched his wrecked pillow for someone else's whole one, and he looked up at a caretaker with total wide-eyed innocence as he went, I'm sorry, I really didn't see anything, I have no idea who would do such a thing.
And Xue Yang decided that actually, he might be able to get along with this guy.
Back when he first got brought on as a Jin disciple and some maids were finishing up helping him into his gaudy new robes, Jin Guangyao appeared at the door to look him over. "It suits you well," he said once he’d dismissed the nervous little girls, and Xue Yang laughed in his face.
"As if I can take your word for it! You guys must really get off on dressing up dirty pigs and rats in gold," he crowed. "I think I passed some on my way here." Jin Guangyao was a stuffy, proper guy on the surface, the kind who looked like he'd quiver and stammer at a yell or a lewd joke, so Xue Yang really wasn't expecting it when his smile went just a little bit vicious.
"Perhaps you may have," he agreed. "Let me show you to your study, Young Master Xue."
Meng Yao tolerated Xue Yang a way no one else did, but he was always studying, studying, studying, so one time Xue Yang sprawled himself over Meng Yao's shoulder while he was pouring over some anatomy text and went, "Whatcha reading?" And the fucking nerd actually started telling him, rattling off something about musculature, so Xue Yang scowled right in his dense face and cut him off, "What the hell, man, why are you telling me this boring shit?"
Meng Yao leveled him with a weirdly intent look, and said, "I'm not going to repeat myself. You're sharp enough to put it to good use after hearing it just once, aren't you, Xue Yang?" And just like that, he kept going. Xue Yang was still young and stupid enough to fall for his ploy and go quiet, but when Meng Yao talked, somehow, everything really did make sense.
Koi Tower hadn't been so bad. He had fun back then.
Jin Guangyao has his hair chopped short and doesn't carry himself the same way he used to, and Xue Yang's deformed left hand tingles like it’s still getting run over. He flexes his four-and-a-half fingers and snatches Jin Guangyao's glasses off his face, and grins brightly at his offended noise of protest.
"Xue Yang."
"Answer the question," Xue Yang sneers, and Jin Guangyao sighs and rubs his temples in that too-familiar way of his.
"It would be careless to lose track of you, knowing what you're like," he spells out slowly. "And even more careless to get on your bad side. Is that so difficult to believe?"
Xue Yang's shoulders go slack. He starts flipping one of the arms of Jin Guangyao's glasses open and closed, idly, under Jin Guangyao's suspicious squint. "What, is that all?" he says finally. "You're losing your touch. You don't have any bigger schemes for me?"
"What use do you imagine I could have for you, where I'm going?" counters Jin Guangyao, dry. "A secretary? A nurse? You'd have a terrible bedside manner."
Xue Yang laughs and twirls the knife in his other hand. "Maybe I could be a surgeon!"
Jin Guangyao smiles sharply (and it's Xue Yang's favorite look on him, the one that gives him a little thrill of superiority, because Jin Guangyao would never let that edge slip in front of anyone else. Not if they were going to live, anyway). "I'd never want to end up on your operating table, Chengmei," he says, and holds out a hand for his glasses back. "Put the knife away and drink the water."
"Why should I listen to you?" Xue Yang puts the glasses on himself instead, then grimaces at how bad they strain his vision and takes them back off. He tosses them into Jin Guangyao's unsuspecting palm and relishes the way he nearly fumbles them, instead. "You seriously fucked up your eyes with all those books."
"You'll have to read just as many if you want to become a surgeon." Jin Guangyao rubs his glasses on his sleeve and puts them back on his nose, and tells Xue Yang, "I have something for you."
Xue Yang isn't sure he even wants anything from him. But he does want to see what it is, so he puts the knife away and drinks the water and follows Jin Guangyao to his room.
"Since when have you remembered?" he asks as they walk.
"I've always remembered." It sounds insane to Xue Yang, in exactly the way Jin Guangyao always was, so naturally he tips his head back and laughs. The water helped clear out the cotton in his head. "I don’t see what's so funny."
"You're such a know-it-all," Xue Yang jeers, and Jin Guangyao laughs a little, too.
"You’d be surprised," he mutters. Then he fishes a plastic-wrapped stick of cherry tanghulu from his bag, and Xue Yang snatches it from his hand before he can even say it's for him. Jin Guangyao rolls his eyes over his smile. "Enjoy."
Xue Yang tosses aside the wrapping and shoves the candy into the hollow of his cheek so he can more or less talk around it. "Thih i'n' gooh enou'," he declares. "Si' on the beh'."
Jin Guangyao gives him a look and makes no move to stop standing.
Xue Yang crunches a cherry off the stick and pulls the rest of it out of his mouth. "Come on, I put the knife away, didn't I? I'm not gonna try anything and you know it. Just sit on the bed, and I'll kindly let you off for taking advantage of me in my vulnerable state."
Jin Guangyao's face still leaves his wariness (and mild disgust) on display for another second or two, but he schools it away in favor of a smile and sits down, slowly and gingerly, on his old bed.
Xue Yang plops down next to him and drops his head in Jin Guangyao's lap. "Pet my head again," he demands.
Jin Guangyao's eyebrows raise. "Even if I take you for fifteen, aren't you a little old for this?"
"As if either of us really care about shit like that. Come on, you don't want to get on my bad side, right?"
Jin Guangyao huffs and surrenders his hand.