Chapter Text
“Oh. It’s you.”
Xiao Xingchen freezes. Excuse me?
He stares at the man glaring at him from the doorway to his assigned dorm.
“...hello to you too...?”
The man narrows his eyes. “Are you sure you’re at the right dorm?”
What’s up with him...?
Xiao Xingchen rummages through his bag to pull out his phone, with the card with his information of where his dorm will be in one of the pockets of his wallet case, and shows it to the very hot, but also very rude man standing in front of him.
The man glares at the note and gets out of the way to the dorm with a long suffering sigh. “Welcome home, roomie.”
Xiao Xingchen feels like crying inside. He’s gonna have to spend the rest of the year with this!?
Xue Yang stares at his new roommate as he starts unpacking his things, decidedly not staring at his ass as he bends over to start unpacking his things.
He can’t believe his luck. Xiao Xingchen is his roommate. He didn’t even know they’d applied to the same universities, nevermind both getting into the same one as each other.
He idly rubs a loose string in his shirt’s sleeves, wondering how the fuck he’s gonna survive the coming year living with the boy—well, man now, who’d been haunting his dreams for years. He wonders if the other man even recognized him. His friend certainly had, never wasting an opportunity to shoot glares at him whenever they had the misfortune of crossing paths in high school.
But.
This isn’t high school anymore. There’s no Song Lan to stop them from ever interacting, not in their own dorm at least.
His eyes flit back over to his roommate’s direction, just in time for some accidental eye contact.
“Is everything alright?”
“Huh?”
“You...seemed a bit irritated earlier. Is there a problem with me being your roommate..?”
Xue Yang freezes.
“Oh, uhh....sorry, just wasn’t expecting to talk to anyone so early in the day, you know? Haven’t had my morning coffee yet and all that”
Xiao Xingchen frowns, clearly not buying the lie, but seems willing to let the topic drop for now and get back to unpacking, and Xue Yang lets out a relieved exhale.
He’s not quite sure how well saying “oh yeah no problem, I’ve just been having weird dreams about you for years that usually lead to you killing yourself because of me” would go over, but probably not that well.
Especially if he and Song Lan’s suspicions that they really were reincarnated souls were true...including the terrible events of their shared dreams.
Xiao Xingchen feels his roommates eyes linger on him as he unpacks his things, but tries to let the uncomfortable feeling leave him. He can’t tell if his roommate is simply having a bad day, or if he’s usually like this.
He feels some of his tension leave him as he unpacks his journal, running his hands along the familiar texture of its cover. He puts it away with his other things with a sigh, wondering if he’ll get another one of his weird dreams tonight.
He recalled one particular dream he had at the start of the summer, where Song Lan had been bleeding from his eyes, and he brought the man to his adoptive mother and had her rip his own eyes out to give to his friend, and had called his friend in hysterics at 3 am about it.
Turns out, his friend had also had the same dream before, and shared his suspicions of them being reincarnated souls. He could tell Song Lan was hiding something from him, but no matter how much he pried, his friend refused to tell him what he was hiding, and eventually he allowed the subject to drop.
He’s still not sure exactly how convinced he is about them being reincarnated, but at the same time, the odds of them both having the same dream, albeit not at the same times, seems rather unlikely.
His eyes are drawn to his journal again.
He wonders if he’ll ever find the nameless man from his dreams, if they truly are memories of a past life.