Work Text:
Zheng Yunlong has a secret that no one ever knows.
He is in love with his old friend.
The child of the grassland carries a cloud in his name, a thunderstorm in his eyes when he got irritated and burrow his brows. Devastatingly handsome. This friend of his, who slept in a bed opposite to his and woke him up everyday not allowing him to miss a single bit of the class, was good to him. Yet Zheng Yunlong never wanted to get up, knowing that he wouldn't get to hear him call his name again and again if he did.
Zheng Yunlong brought him to his homeland once. The boy from Qingdao is used to the ocean since childhood, blue, wide and serene. But Ayanga came from somewhere vast and boundless, would he like it here?
Ayanna just smiled with his eyes, curved like the crescent moon. He said, “I’m bringing you to the grassland one day, to my home.”
Would he still bring the seaside boy to the grassland when he knows his secret?
The seagull longs for the grassland, so that he may fly with the hawk.
There’s a lot of things in the world that don't become real until you say it. Like Zheng Yunlong’s feeling for Ayanga, for example. No one knows what they boy feels. When there is no witness, there is no proof to its existence. Zheng Yunlong can always laugh it out, Gazi and I are just good friends, and no one can take out any evidence to disagree.
He never knew those are just bullshit before the graduation show. Everything on the stage seemed so real, every emotion in the song tangible, rain seconds to pour from his deep-set eyes. His Angel was beautiful, and he felt like an absolute fool in his fake glasses.
Face against face, body against body, they sang, “You’ll be my castle and I’ll be your moat”. How on earth is Ayanga so painstaking beautiful with this ridiculous wig and overdone makeup?
Zheng Yunlong was left with an aching heart and a throbbing groin.
The last rehearsal before the show was so filled with emotions he sang exceptionally well. He felt like Collins as well, on the verge of dying when Angel was gone. He ran to Ayanga right afterwards, hugging him tight from the back and Ayanga just stayed, and whispered to his crumbling, crying mess - It’s okay, I’m not dead, while he gestured to other actors that Zheng Yunlong was fine, he was just not out of his character yet.
It’s wasn't a big deal that he couldn't get out his character, the problem was that there’s no way he could get out of the reality. He started having dreams a few days after the graduation performance, where he kissed those familiar lips, bodies tangling in bed, the very same person who keeps calling his name again and again until he woke up. Zheng Yunlong looked at Ayanga’s face and thought, those lips he kissed were unpainted, what he had heard was his own name, Dalong, Dalong…
He was going insane he didn't dare to sleep, running up to the dorm rooftop at midnight to have a smoke, knowing that Ayanga would have given him some serious lecturing if he knows. He dumped the butt on the ground among some other, his gaze on the nigh sky at BDA, knowing something just exists without the need of proving. Zheng Yunlong couldn't summon the courage to say it out, yet it doesn't mean that it does not exit.
His heart was soaked throughly in plum wine, just like how he is drunken with jealousy.
His lips pressed against the concrete wall of the roof, trembling ever so slightly, confessing his unspeakable feelings to his best friend in silence. The wall absorbed his secret. The quiet building were the witness to his love.
Zheng Yunlong was back to normal in just a few days. His friends joked about how he wasn't himself at then. They all knew that he ran to Ayanga and held him while he cried, and they all said that someday, someday he’s going to be a great actor.
Ayanga and him, hands on each other’s shoulders, the two boys tangled and mingled, and everyone knows they are each other’s best mates. They promised each other that they would perform on stage together, if not, they would be each other’s audience though every show. And maybe one day, they will make the time to go to Inner Mongolia, to Ayanga’s home.
They have a long way to go.